What is the difference between Su E and Su U?
2 Answers
There is no difference in usage permissions between Su E and Su U. The details are as follows: 1. Both Su U and Su E license plates indicate that the vehicle was registered at the Suzhou Vehicle Management Office, representing "Suzhou-registered" vehicles. On October 23, 2018, the Traffic Police Brigade of the Suzhou Public Security Bureau in Jiangsu Province began using the Su U issuing authority code after the Su E license plates were exhausted. 2. After the introduction of Su U, corresponding license plate numbers will be continuously added to the license plate pool in segments. Su U license plates can be processed at the Suzhou Vehicle Management Office, county and district-level vehicle management offices, industrial park and Xiangcheng vehicle management service centers, as well as all motor vehicle registration service stations citywide, uniformly adopting the "50-choose-1" selection model.
This is actually a pretty common question among us drivers. Both Su E and Su U are license plate prefixes within Jiangsu Province, with the main difference lying in their regional allocation. Su E primarily represents license plates from Nantong, meaning if you register your vehicle in Nantong, Jiangsu, your plate will start with Su E. As for Su U, it's a supplementary license plate series for Suzhou. Due to Suzhou's rapid economic development and the surge in vehicle numbers, the original Su E series became insufficient. To address this, the traffic management authorities introduced Su U. So now, new vehicles in Suzhou might carry Su U plates, while new vehicles in Nantong continue to use Su E. Don't worry about any performance differences or such—it's purely a regional identifier, similar to Beijing's Jing A or Shanghai's Hu B, aimed at facilitating vehicle source management and identification. When buying a car, there's really no need to dwell on this. Focus instead on the vehicle's condition or emission standards to avoid spending unnecessarily on fixing a bunch of issues.
