A brief recap: a few weeks ago I’d taken the $155,000 Range Rover I was testing out to run some errands with my wife in Plymouth, Minnesota. I was backing out of a parking space in front of my local Kohl’s when four cop cars came screaming up and “initiated a box and pin on the vehicle,” as the police report says. Hands on their guns, the officers ordered us out of the vehicle, patted us down, and eventually told us the Range Rover’s license plate—New Jersey 34 10 DTM—was stolen, they suspected the vehicle itself was stolen too, and they’d used Flock cameras to track me down over the last two days.
The scenario involving my wife and I is just one of many like it. Thomas noted that the system is 99% accurate today, but it’s performing 20 billion reads a month. That 1% error rate, of which I was a part of in June, makes for two hundred million misreads a month.
Customized images, yes. Overlapping alphanumeric codes (two vehicles with the same sequence?) NO. Maybe it was necessary in the 1960s, but it is long since past time for issuance of alpha-numeric unique identifiers to become… unique throughout the states.
How many digits to we need for 297,500,000 plates (as of 2026).
Plus we should probably include Canada and Mexico, since they have the same sized plates and cross the borders regularly.
Canada also has custom plates and different designs in each province too.
Also unless I’m mistaken, when Britain was in the EU, it didn’t use standardized plates like the rest of the member states, right?
A UK plate is 2 letters, 2 numbers, 3 letters. That’s over a billion combinations.
There are no standard plates in the EU. The only matching thing is the country code on the left side.
That’s a lot closer to standardized than the Canada or the US.
Well, that’s true.
But one fun quirk is that (at least here in Finland) the EU plate isn’t mandatory, you can get a clean one with no country code but then if you leave the country you are required to indicate your country of origin with a bumper sticker. So the automated license plate reader might need to be able to figure out from what country this is, and often that sticker will be stuck to the corner of the rear window.
Also a reminder - there will be no sticker on the front :)
Just in Minnesota, and I don’t even think that’s all of them
Colorado has a ton. I couldn’t find any images showing all of them though, just a couple collections of older plates.
6 characters (A-Z 0-9) gives you 2,176,782,336 combinations.
Even if you take out some confusing combos like O0, 1I, 5S, 8B … 6 characters of 31 different kinds gives you 887,503,681
The number drops even more when offensive words or phrases are removed. Nobody’s getting a license plate that reads P00 A55 or a bad word for black people.
Then make it 7 or 8 characters like most countries have. Its not like that wouldn’t fit on plates. With 8 chars you could remove 2/3 of all combinations and still have an order of magnitude in reserve.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LICENSEPLATES/comments/1ux71nl/the_whole_sqz_a55_story/
Ewwww I’m not reading anything on Reddit
What about 7 characters?
You wouldn’t believe it. Even more!
the formula is number of possible symbols (letters, numbers) S to the power of the number of characters on the plate N, or S^N, so if you add one more character out of 31 possible symbols, then you multiply by (another) 31 available combinations.
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