This Means Something: Deciphering License Plates

Forgive the sophomoric (freshmanic, even) attempt at humor, but this is as good as any photo to illustrate how to figure out at a glance of where a certain car is from-- because here, we can say stuff like "that car has Berlin plates" with one look. I can tell this particular car is from the neighboring city of Fürth (pronounced "fyrt"), and furthermore, can be certain that it is NOT from the smaller city of the same name/spelling in the neighboring state of Hesse. How? Basically (and there are exceptions-- this is Germany after all), cars registered in large cities have one letter on the far left of the plate, medium sized cities have 2 letters, and smaller cities have 3. So Nuremberg plates all start with "N"; Berlin plates start with "B," Munich plates all start with "M" and so on. Fürth is a city of about 115,000, which puts it squarely in the medium size realm. Next to the 1-2 or 3 letter city code are 2 stickers (click on photo for close up). The top sticker is the registration expiry; the lower sticker is a shield with one of the 16 German states-- in the case of this plate, we see the Bavarian shield so if you don't know what city a car is from, you can figure out the region. To the right of the stickers are a letter and number combination, usually (but not always-- hello? Germany) 2 letters and 3 numbers. Sometimes these have meanings like the outlying areas of a city, but a lot of the time it's randomly generated. Vanity plates can be found but aren't overly common, especially seeing as the city code must be present. An informed source tells me that some folks from Fürth know what they're doing, know their slang, and are having some fun getting one over on the authorities.

The car these plates are attached to is an old Citroën 2CV6, a bit of a cult car, and the French's answer to the VW Beetle. I have some shots of this car from around town, so I'll put those up soon as well.