Michigan Plates
The earliest form of Michigan license plate that I remember, although aparently during the first several years of my life a different plate did exists, is the plain blue plate with three numbers a space and three letters. According to this interesting web page, that format of plate was introduced in 1983. In 1993 the format was switched to three letters first followed by three numbers, which is what I've had on my own cars. In 2005 I guess they ran out of combinations and switched to three letters followed by four numbers, for the first time going to 7 characters for MI plates.
Since the first of this year there is a new "plain" MI plate. The format remains the same, but now only the very top is white on blue, and most of the plate is white. I'm sad to see the all blue plates go, but it's not the first complete change and it probably won't be the last. It does mean when my renewal comes through any day now I'll have a whole new license number to remember.
Back to the blue plates with 7 characters, though. When those were first introduced, the three letters and four numbers were run together with no space. At some point, though, the font and/or font size was changed to allow for space between the letters and numbers. I've been trying, through casual observation, to determine when this change occured, and I'm getting close. I've known for a while that AHH plates have the space and AB- plates do not. Recently I think I saw an AF-something plate with the space, which narrowed it down to A plus C, D or E being the switching point (or so I thought). Today, though, in a major breakthrough, I found an AFC plate without the space. That puts the change during the AF- series, although I'm not sure exactly where, yet.
If that's too heavy, the most important license plate news of the day is I saw my first BEN series plate (which is on the new mostly white plates). This should be the first of many, as theoretically there are up to 10,000 such plates. Unfortunately, I renewed too late to get a BEN plate of my own, but that would have been fun.
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