5 ms·
I've always felt that besides all the jokes about German efficiency and precision, German license plates actually have lots of cool and helpful features: They
by ThePadawan 4y ago
I've always felt that besides all the jokes about German efficiency and precision, German license plates actually have lots of cool and helpful features:
They use a font intentionally designed to make simple alterations such as F->E harder and/or more obvious [0].
They aren't a random sequence of characters - they have semantics built-in: A German license plate follows the pattern
[A-Z]{1,3} [A-Z]{1,2} [0-9]{1-4}
(my knowledge here might be a bit outdated)
where the first tuple is the issuing authority, the second tuple a qualifier thereof, and the third tuple just a random digit sequence.
The issuing authority is a variable-length optimality-based code: Large issuers like the state of Berlin get "B", whereas the city of Bitburg gets "BIT".
The qualifier follows the same idea: Plates issued in a rural area (AFAIK - I'm a bit rusty on the topic) generally have 1-letter combinations, while ones issued in cities have 2 letters (for a larger address space compared to adding a digit in the third tuple)
So what's the point? Well, motorists can immediately tell if another vehicle is
* from out of state (similar to the US - because all license plates have the state's signet on them)
* from out of town (so if you're in an urban area, they probably don't know their way around and you should keep some distance)
* from the deepest of rural areas (so not only will they not know their way around, they might also not know what a bicycle lane or a roundabout are, given the state of rural German infrastructure).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-Schrift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-Schrift
- rippercushions 4y agoFinland used to do the same. They gave up when they realized that requiring people to reregister their cars after moving was a huge, pointless hassle, plus the original scheme was starting to run out of number space, meaning that big issuers like Helsinki were already using multiple non-obvious letters.
- filmor 4y agoYou can nowadays keep your license plate in Germany when moving.
- bombcar 4y agoAfter decades of living in CA where plates stay with the car (unless vanity) I was floored to learn there are states where the plates stay with the person.
- ThePadawan 4y ago> They gave up when they realized that requiring people to reregister their cars after moving was a huge, pointless hassle [...] I understand why this hasn't caught on here in Switzerland /j
- belter 4y agoAnd that somebody can see you are from out of town, is one of the things I dislike the most about German license plates...
- WelcomeShorty 4y agoSwiss here: I love it. Makes me understand why you drive like a newbe in my town.
- dfox 4y agoGerman license plates also have one non-obvious pitfall: the space/dash between the two first letter groups is significant, which breaks various systems that normalize alphanumeric codes by removing spaces and dashes.
- cyphar 4y agoQuite a few countries in Europe have the issuing authority scheme (Serbia, for one -- but there's probably a list of countries which do this somewhere). While you could argue it is sometimes useful to know if a car is from out of town, it just helps form stereotypes (drivers from X are awful, etc).
- toast0 4y ago> the third tuple just a random digit sequence. Is it actually random? Most license plate issuers use sequential allocation for the portion of the plate not otherwise restricted by use, and I would expect Germany to as well (unless they're trying to avoid the German Tank Problem[1]) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem
- ThePadawan 4y agoSorry, "arbitrary to the observer" :). (I can hear my old distributed algorithms prof shouting at me even after years after graduating)