Only in Beijing? Protect your legal plate!!!!

[bikerdoc]

Sorry, no more info. We probably won't know the details until it actually starts to happen, a year from now. Be a bummer if one had something like 88888 (most desirable) and has it replaced with 47474 (least desirable 4s & 7s).

Interesting how the NL deals with reissues. I guess if your plate has been stolen, and you have a reissue with the same number (and the extra "little number"), you'd probably be pulled over by the police on a regular basis.

Here in this city of Zhejiang, no plates with the 'A' prefix are issued, as all plates (motorcycles, cars, vans, buses etc) start with B. All A's issued plates are from Hangzhou and towns under that cities jurisdiction. The second digit in the series happens to be the district where the plate is issued. In my case this digit happens to be number '8' :) Consequently I can generally tell from looking at the prefix letter and the next number in the sequence where the licence plate is issued/place of vehicle owners registered residence (doesn't always mean they live there though since it is tied in with the persons Hukou).

All plates in this city are issued using a computer system.

The registering owner gets to push a button to stop a random selected set of plates spinning. The spinning combination is fast so that it is nearly impossible to really get exactly the plate combo one might like out of those being offered at the time. Once the button is pushed, 3 plate options are then presented, and the owner has a choice out of the 3 plates.

Me and a few others have plates with a combination of the highly desirable number 8, the only difference is that one of the numbers has to be a letter. Just plated my new bike the other day with 8_888 (underscore is where the letter goes) which joins two more in my fleet with the same combo - each though with a different letter. The other bikes belonging to friends with these combos are all HD's & one BMW R1200GS. Plates stolen or lost here, require issuing of new sets of numbers & plates, though with these special "8_888" plates that require guanxi to get in the first place, it's likely we'd get some special consideration. No one has had this problem though... touch wood. While the numbers themselves might be highly desirable, I'd think the plates are less attractive as a target for thieves as they are likely too distinctive than just an arbitrary set of random letters and numbers on some nondescript plate/bike.

Anyway these plates are not issued in the same manner as the above computer selection. The alternative method requires guanxi.