I fixed Irish car registration plate formatting. Discuss.

Bob Harris

The three digit year system just looks silly. The Portuguese had a system up to last year with a yellow segment on the right denoting the year and month of registration. Not really sure why it's such a big deal anyway. You'd think the year would be enough.

CiniO

I think Ireland could even do with 4 characters on the plate.

Completely random, so each character could be any of 26 letters or 10 numbers.
26+10 = 36

36*36*36*36 = 1,679,616 combinations.

That's not enough so ideally we could use 5 different colours of number plates (like yellow, blue, green, orange, white) so that would give us total of of nearly 8.4 million combinations which is more than there are active registered vehicles in Ireland at the moment, and possibly at any one time in the foreseeable future.
Obviously numbers from scrapped, exported vehicle should be resued.

In such system we would be getting something like "A35X" or "123F" or "ABCD" or "S8J9".
Colour would be important as well, as obviously each 4 characters combination could be repeated in each of 5 colours.

I'm sure people would remember it easily like red M4SM

jeoun

jeoun wrote: »

I agree. They should be allowed to use the ZV plates classic cars use or something similar - ZH maybe!

RIP would be more appropriate,

eg for a Dublin hearse D-76-RIP

Larbre34

People should be let register their cars as whatever they want, so long as the plate complies with decency limitations and is limited to letters and whole numbers. I could reserve LARBRE34 as my plate, I'd gladly pay for the privilege.

And to be fair, its not like they don't do it already. Theres a new silver Ferrari 812 in the Dublin area with the plate 211-D-21812 (as in 2021 812 model). I'm told to reserve a particular numerical plate to suit a particular model, costs a grand.

Why not charge for any sort of combinations? Nice little money spinner for the DoT.

TaurenDruid

CiniO wrote: »

I think Ireland could even do with 4 characters on the plate.

Completely random, so each character could be any of 26 letters or 10 numbers.
26+10 = 36

36*36*36*36 = 1,679,616 combinations.

That's not enough so ideally we could use 5 different colours of number plates (like yellow, blue, green, orange, white) so that would give us total of of nearly 8.4 million combinations which is more than there are active registered vehicles in Ireland at the moment, and possibly at any one time in the foreseeable future.
Obviously numbers from scrapped, exported vehicle should be resued.

In such system we would be getting something like "A35X" or "123F" or "ABCD" or "S8J9".
Colour would be important as well, as obviously each 4 characters combination could be repeated in each of 5 colours.

I'm sure people would remember it easily like red M4SM

Apart from the 10% of men who are colourblind. And the higher proportion who can't differentiate colours at night...

Sparkey84

CiniO wrote: »

I think Ireland could even do with 4 characters on the plate.

Completely random, so each character could be any of 26 letters or 10 numbers.
26+10 = 36

36*36*36*36 = 1,679,616 combinations.

That's not enough so ideally we could use 5 different colours of number plates (like yellow, blue, green, orange, white) so that would give us total of of nearly 8.4 million combinations which is more than there are active registered vehicles in Ireland at the moment, and possibly at any one time in the foreseeable future.
Obviously numbers from scrapped, exported vehicle should be resued.

In such system we would be getting something like "A35X" or "123F" or "ABCD" or "S8J9".
Colour would be important as well, as obviously each 4 characters combination could be repeated in each of 5 colours.

I'm sure people would remember it easily like red M4SM

i think that is a great idea, maybe instead of colour just do one extra digit. 5 digits in any letter number order gives 60 million combinations. might have to avoid some rude combinations like MORON or ME69S etx

Jim_Hodge

Deleted User wrote: »

RIP would be more appropriate,

eg for a Dublin hearse D-76-RIP

Older registrations used RIP for Kilkenny.

mickdw

Using both number and letters in all positions would lead to serious confusion trying to distinguish between 1 and I and 0 and letter O so i think using letters only and using 5 digits would be a better solution. Nearly 12 million unique plates.
A year identifier plus 4 digits would give 450000 approx unique plates each year.

mickdw

mickdw wrote: »

Using both number and letters in all positions would lead to serious confusion trying to distinguish between 1 and I and 0 and letter O so i think using letters only and using 5 digits would be a better solution. Nearly 12 million unique plates.
A year identifier plus 4 digits would give 450000 approx unique plates each year.

Most countries choose to have letters and numbers in set positions to avoid that confusion, NI plates are a good example of always three letters including I and four numbers including 1
As it is there are a huge number of Irish plates where the county MO is on the plate as M0 or the 0 in the years is O.

mickdw

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Most countries choose to have letters and numbers in set positions to avoid that confusion, NI plates are a good example of always three letters including I and four numbers including 1

Yes but the suggestion here was to use 36 options for each position which means letters and numbers mixed. It wouldnt work.

CiniO

mickdw wrote: »

Yes but the suggestion here was to use 36 options for each position which means letters and numbers mixed. It wouldnt work.

Well I suppose we could avoid using letters like
I to avoid confusion with 1,
B to avoid confusion with 8,
D,O,Q to avoid confusion with 0
Z to avoid confusion with 2
S to avoid confusion with 5
that still gives us 19 letters and 10 numbers so 29 possible options for each field on number plate.

If using 5 character number plates, that still gives 16.5 millions combinations which is plenty for country size of Ireland.

Clarifier

I think this makes good sense. The current use of the third space by just two digits is a waste and leads to longer numbers after the county letters. I would suggest altering the "month letter" sequence to exclude letters already included in the county letters, so we would end up with:

A - January
B - February
F - March
J - April
P - May
Q - June
U - July
V - August
Z - September, October, November, December

So Wicklow April 2021 would be 21J WW 123

I've left out "I" as it looks like 1. I'm assuming not too many vehicles are registered after September. And I suppose J could stand for January and F for February if people are fussed!

stoneill

colm_mcm wrote: »

We could look at different shape and colour plates.
So blue triangle could be Dublin and maroon circle could be Galway, red rhombus for Cork etc. We could maybe group provinces by shape and counties by colour.

Dodecahedron please.