Everyday pleasures

In the United States, license plates are a matter for each of the fifty states. Although size and shape are uniform, the appearance of plates varies considerably. During long-distance road trips, travelers of all ages can enjoy hunting for and spotting vehicles from other states.

France reportedly invented the license plate and recently changed how French plates look. Historically, they featured a series of letters and numbers, and ended in a two-digit code that identified the département where the vehicle’s owner resided. The code for Paris, for example, was 75. In recent years, the letter “F” on a blue background with the European Union emblem identified the registration as French.

The new French plates feature a series of letters and numbers (in a uniform AA 1234 ZZ format), but do not identify where the car’s owner is from. This bodes poorly for highway identification games or jokes about drivers from Paris or other unfavored areas.

This provoked an uproar from motorists, and led the authorities to offer optional identification by region. In this example, the plate is shown to be from the Brittany region, and particularly from the Ille-et-Vilaine département (where the city of St Malo is located). I’m unclear on the practicalities, but apparently the option allows a motorist to choose a region based on pure affinity, for example a favored vacation destination. The new plate system also is intended to register a vehicle, rather than an owner; a vehicle will keep the same registration throughout its life. Whether an initial owner’s regional preferences can be imposed on future owners remains unclear to me.