LONG POST
I have long known that non-personalized CA plates for autos have been logically sequenced, and it is often possible to guess what year (and month) a car was purchased by knowing the plate. Sure, some cars are newly-plated when transferred to the next owner, and some owners (rarely) keep their non-personalized plates. But most are straightforward, sequenced in order (not the same for truck plates).
In 1969, the era of the black plates with yellow letters was ending, as they were all [Letter Letter Letter ###]. Let’s call it LLL###. The last one would have been ZZZ999. That same year, the new blue plates with yellow letters began rolling out, with ###LLL. The 1st one would have been 000AAA.
About 1981, the blue plates ran out of numbers and letters for the ###LLL sequence (the last one being 999ZZZ), and so began the #LLL### sequence where the 1st one would have been 1AAA000. After they hit 1ZZZ999, they went to 2AAA000 and kept going with the logic, exhausting the alphas and numbers from 2ZZZ999 to 3AAA000, then 3ZZZ999 to 4AAA000, etc. (Sometime around 1986, the CA DMV changed to white plates, but kept the sequencing; it started at about 2AAA000. And there are now tribute black plates but I haven’t figured out the logic to their sequencing yet). We are now at just about 9M here in CA (9AAA000 started a few months ago, back in 2023). That means we went through the alphabet 9 times between 1981 and 2024, about 4.7 years per round of alphabet.
In any case, we do seem to go through a full round of #LLL### every 4 to 6-ish years lately (it seems it was a longer cycle in the 70s), so if we are at 9M in June 2024, we will hit 9ZZZ999 in a couple years and will need some kind of reset.
Does anyone here know what the DMV is planning?
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Below are some of my old plates (by memory) and a list of what I am guessing some of the missing years are (indicated by the ‘??’), since I we didn’t buy a new car every year. I have also added a few from your posts below. Using these and the avg # of mos that a 2nd digit/letter covers, I can sometimes triangulate someone else’s date of DMV registration year, and guess the month, within 2-3 months). Try me: send me just your 1st two digits/letter combo of your CA plate and I will try to guess it.
1969 XTR### (black)
1969 3##APR (blue)
1970 ###E??
1971 ###I??
1972 ###L??
1973 ###N??
1974 ###RZR
1975 ###S??
1976 ###T??
1977 ###U??
1978 ###W??
1979 ###Y??
1980 ###ZLI
1981 1DMW###
1982 1FFY###
1985 1LJV###
1986 1RCF###
1986 2DBL### (white)
1987 2EWP### (Jun)
1990 2TGB###
~missing a lot here~ …kept our cars for a minute back then
1997 3FHP### <–we started leasing here (but no LH to guide us!)
1998 4DOB### (Sept)
1998 4DSU### (Sept)
2001 4UVH### (Sept)
2001 4VUHxx (Dec)
2005 5xxx##?
2008 6FKM### (Sept)
2011 6TTB### (Nov)
2013 7BKR###
2014 7HON### (this may have been 2015)
2017 7WNM### (Jan)
2018 8EVE### (Jun)
2019 8HNH### (Jan)
2021 8VZK### (Mar)
2021 8WFM### (Apr)
. ~couple’a 4xe’s slot in here but forgot the plate #s~
2021 8XCN### (Sept)
2023 9HIH### (Aug)
2024 9KME### (Jan)
2024 9LSW### (Mar)
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{SEND YOUR PLATES and/or corrections and I will edit the list}
This article asks the big question:
