Back in 1980, the Golden State adopted a new numbering scheme for its passenger-car license plates: A number followed by three letters followed by three numbers, i.e. “1AAA000.”
Given new car sales at the time, and considering this scheme was for passenger vehicles only — motorcycles and commercial vehicles got their own number combinations, and let’s not forget how Californians love their vanity plates — this should have provided enough license plate numbers for the better part of a century. (In California, license plates stay with the car for its lifetime and the alphanumeric combinations are not re-used.)
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Well, that didn’t work. The Sacramento Bee reports that as of now, 45 years after the new scheme was implemented, California estimates that it will hit 9ZZZ999 — the last plate possible in the sequence — by the end of 2025. As late as this past December, the state thought its sequencing would last until sometime in 2027, but car sales are rising this year at an unexpectedly high rate. Maybe it’s because buyers are rushing to head off tariffs, or perhaps it’s all those folks dumping their Teslas, or maybe it’s just the dynamics of the country’s most voracious car-buying state.
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California really is car crazy: It has a total of 13.2 million registered cars (that’s just the registered ones!), nearly twice as many as the next-most-car-populous states, Texas and Florida, and nearly as many as the bottom 25 car-owning states combined*. In a typical year, Californians buy 10 to 12 percent of the nation’s new cars, usually on the order of around 1.7 million. That’s more new cars than France, about the same as Italy and Canada, and nearly as many as the UK and Germany.
(* Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, both Dakotas, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, Wyoming)
So what’s a state to do? We know what we’d do if we were in charge: Everyone gets a vanity plate, and if you can’t come up with something witty or funny enough for our liking, you get sent to live in Arizona.
California’s solution is, sadly, far more pragmatic: They’ll invert the sequence to the format “000AAA0.” We should start seeing the new sequence show up early next year, and at the rate Californians are buying new cars, it should last at least a year or two.
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