Are there o and i in license plates?
3 Answers
There are no o and i in license plates, which is to distinguish them from the Arabic numerals 1 and 0. License plates, also known as vehicle plates, refer to the number plates hung on the front and rear of a vehicle, engraved with the vehicle's registration number, registration region, or other relevant information. Their main functions are: 1. To identify the region to which the vehicle belongs through the license plate; 2. To trace the owner and registration information of the vehicle based on the license plate. The installation method of license plates is: 1. Take out the screws of the license plate and rotate them into the anti-theft caps; 2. Position the license plate correctly, align the screws with the gaps on the bumper, and secure them with tools; 3. Cover the anti-theft caps and press them into place.
When I first started learning to drive, I asked my instructor this question, and he said that ordinary license plates absolutely cannot have the letters O and I. This is because the numbers 0 and 1 are very commonly used on license plates, and the letter O looks almost identical to the number 0, while the letter I closely resembles the number 1. If these letters were actually used, the police could easily make mistakes when issuing tickets, and car owners might run into confusion during annual inspections. Once, a friend of mine saw a license plate with an O on the highway, but it turned out to be a special diplomatic plate. Ordinary civilian license plates uniformly avoid these two troublesome letters. The letters you usually see on license plates are selected from A to Z, deliberately skipping O and I—even the new energy green plates follow this rule.
I used to help organize archives at the vehicle management office and have seen tens of thousands of license plate photos. I can responsibly tell you that the nationally unified 92-style license plate standard explicitly prohibits the use of O and I. The main consideration is recognition issues: when surveillance cameras capture traffic violations, the number 0 and the letter O are indistinguishable in the images. Last year, there was a van with a counterfeit plate. The original plate was Gan G·12345, and the counterfeit plate was altered to Gan G·I2345, causing the traffic police system to misidentify it. Now, the new license plate letter library only includes the 24 letters ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ, so you won’t see O or I as options when choosing a plate number.
