The New Mystery

It's official, the DA's are out and they're on trucks.

The real mystery is, why are there no CA's or CE's? Will there be a CU? I was guessing they were saving the C-vowels for truck plates, but my guesses have been wrong in the past. Actually, I've been wrong on every guess so far with this plate business.

Greatest Thing

The greatest thing about this blog; I automatically win any "who's a bigger nerd" contest.

The CJ Dilemma

I recently wrote about the new lighter plates and how they started with CK. It was an incorrect assumption because now I've seen light colored CJ's and dark colored CJ's. Naturally, I have a desire to pin point what number of CJ this started. Here is what I've got so far.

CJ1 - dark
CJ2 - dark
CJ8 - light
CJ9 - light

So I'm guessing somewhere between 2 and 8 they started issuing lighter colored plates. I've never payed attention to the third character, I just always assumed they came out in order from 0 to 9. I hope paying special attention to CJ will give me some insight.

It's been a year?

It's is clear I am not good at updating my license plate blog, but who cares? No one is reading this anyway.

I have noticed the newer plates, starting with CK for cars and AY for trucks, look washed out. The backgrounds are significantly lighter then their predecessors. I can only assume this was done because the new plates are hard to read from a distance.

I actually noticed the lighter pictures on CL's first. There are a lot of CL's around school. CK's I saw for the first time today. Funny how that works. I surmise that different distribution points get different numbers and that's why sometimes we see an abundance of some letters over others. Occasionally this leads to observing plates out of order.

Also, today marks the first time I've ever seen a plate that starts with a B on a truck. The plate itself did not say truck, but it was one of the Home Depot rent me trucks. It was definitely a truck; 3/4 ton truck at that. Many SUV's and light trucks are questionable. I've seen both car and truck plates on just about everything that could remotely be classified as a truck. This marks the first time I've seen a car plate on something unquestionably a truck.

I look forward to finding a truck plate on a sedan.

This post also marks that it has been a year since I started observing Texas license plates. At first it was stupid and I kept it to myself. Then one day I got brave and told my girlfriend about it. She thought it was fun. Since then I've told a few more people and they all tell me what plates they've seen lately. I can only guess this nerdy past time is not as dull as I thought it would be.

Thanks to everyone who has helped me spot license plates!

No CA or CE?

The past few days I've noticed a plethora of C's emerging in the area. In fact I just saw a new one, CG a couple of days ago. Still no CA or CE, which got me thinking, maybe they are leaving out the vowels for the C's. Maybe that's what the Truck plates will use after they run out of A's.

Unfortunately, the next vowel used in license plates will be U (I and O are not used for the obvious reasons), so it will be a little while before CU could be around. Considering how long it's been since CA should have been around, and I've seen so many CB, CC, CD, CF, and now a CG, it is plausible they've skipped the vowels. Only time will tell.

None of this explains the lack of an AU. I know I have seen AA and AE, but they were out before I started keeping track. Which is why they are not on the list. There are less A's so there is a good chance I just haven't seen one yet. Once I start seeing more AV's and AW's then I'll start some AU conspiracy theories.

Added Tracker

I added a tracker in the right column today. It's just a simple html table, but I have to admit I never bothered to wrap my head around those until today. I found a real-time HTML editor that was useful in figuring it out; bookmarked that one for later too. Of course the W3C was the key to figuring out the syntax to make a table.

I know it's not pretty, but it is an important part of the site. Later I may change it up to be sortable. I hear there is a little javascript I can make that happen with.

Courtesy of Texas

I also added some rather lame art blatantly ripped it off this image. Some day I will do my best to make it pretty. I think it would be cool to incorporate the red squiggly on the upper right somewhere on the site too (what is that anyway?).

While coming up with the background image for the title I came up with a new title for the blog. It is now cleverly called "The Lone Star Plate Hunt".

After making the sad image with Microsoft Paint, I almost changed it to "Hunt the Lone Star Plate," but that would require a lot more effort. My MS Paint skills just aren't what they used to be.

What Counts?

The new Texas plates come in two variations, both with similar patterns. It took me some time to figure it out, but plates marked 'Truck' start with an 'A'. All other plates, I've decided to call them regular or car plates, started with a 'B'. Both types have a total of seven characters divided up into a 3-4 pattern. 

For example, truck plates are all an AB1-2345 pattern. Two letters and a number in the first part, then four numbers in the second part. They increase incrementally. The first plates were AA, then AB. Currently the highest I've seen is AV.

Car plates are very similar except they started with B. An example would be BA1-A234. Notice the letter in the second part of the plate number. Assuming 10 different numbers can be used (0-9) and 23 letters used from the alphabet, this gives cars significantly more plates.

For every BAx-xxxx there would be a total of 230,000 plates (10x23x10x10x10). On the truck plate side, for every AAx-xxxx it would be merely 100,000 plates (10x10x10x10x10). From my observations there are a lot more car plates than truck plates in Texas (amazing I know-but I'll get back to this in a later post).

It is the second letter of either plate that is most significant (to me anyway). So if the last truck plate I saw was AS, that means now I keep an eye out for anything higher. Presumably AT would come next, but this is not always true. Some letters are not used (another post topic). Sometimes you just see them out of order (yet another future post topic).

Now that all those details are out of the way, what counts? Like I said in the first post, I only count plates I've personally seen. This does not mean I discount when other people tell me about anything new. My girlfriend told me she saw an AS; even sent me a photo of it from her cell phone. Even though I had not seen it yet myself (don't count photo's either), her sighting confirmed the existence of AS.

Finally, we've established the particulars to how this plate hunting works. So where are we today? I plan to post a column on the side that shows the current plates spotted and the dates they were seen. But for now I'll update within this post.

Highest Car Plate

CF - October 3

Highest Truck Plate

AV - September 25