VehiclesDB

Germany license plate: Standard 1956

Retired 1956 to 2000. Standard plates for car, van, truck, bus, motorcycle, and trailer, set by the Fahrzeug-Zulassungsverordnung (FZV). One of 13 Germany license plates.

Germany license plate, Standard 1956 (1956 to 2000), sample QR-FK 4478
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Format, years and the law

Format
LL-LL 9999, for example QR-FK 4478 (L is any letter, 9 any digit)

The letters before the seal are the district, M München, KA Karlsruhe, a mechanism this black-on-white era introduced in 1956 and today's Euro plates inherited letter for letter. The serial behind it never meant anything, then or now.

The format above follows the issuing rules: a registration that fits it is one this series could have issued.

Years issued
1956 to 2000. No longer issued.
Vehicle class
Standard: the default series issued to private road vehicles. Issued for car, van, truck, bus, motorcycle, and trailer.
Colours
Characters #000000 Background #FFFFFF
Size
520 × 110 mm · every country's size
Typeface
DIN 1451 Mittelschrift (attribution); statutory object = the Anlage V (1956) Schriftmuster drawings; The 1956 instrument prescribes plate lettering by DRAWING (Anlage V), exactly as the FZV 2023 does for FE-Schrift. · license plate fonts
About this plate
The pre-1956 occupation-era systems (white-on-black, 1948 four-zone codes) are OUT OF SCOPE for L1 (historical depth is L4); the 1956 instrument's own transitional gives them until 1.7.1958.
How the region is encoded
§ 23 Abs. 2 StVZO (1956), verbatim: the Kennzeichen contains "das Unterscheidungszeichen für den Verwaltungsbezirk", "aus einem bis drei Buchstaben nach dem Plan in Anlage I", the district list was IN the StVZO in 1956 (Anlage I, ~600 codes printed in BGBl. 1956 I Nr. 15) and only later delegated to Bundesanzeiger publication (§ 9 Abs. 3 FZV today). Decode rows for withdrawn 1956-era codes need period discipline; the code list grew again in 1990/91 when the new Länder joined the system.

Legal basis and sources

  1. Verordnung zur Änderung von Vorschriften des Straßenverkehrsrechts vom 14.3.1956, BGBl. I S. 199, § 23 Abs. 2 (district prefix + Erkennungsnummer, Anlage I plan), § 60 Abs. 1 (black on white), Anlage II (the five... https://media.offenegesetze.de/bgbl1/1956/bgbl1_1956_15.pdf
  2. 32. ÄndVStVR vom 20.7.2000, BGBl. I S. 1090, PERIOD END: Euro form mandatory for plates newly fitted from 1.11.2000, so DIN-era issuance ends 31.10.2000; 'Kennzeichen, die vor dem 1. November 2000 zugeteilt worden... https://media.offenegesetze.de/bgbl1/2000/bgbl1_2000_34.pdf

This plate in your app

The series id is de-standard-1956. The API returns its format, validation, colours and designs with the rest of Germany's series:

curl -s https://vehiclesdb.com/api/v1/plates/de \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VEHICLESDB_API_KEY" \
  | jq '.series[] | select(.id == "de-standard-1956")'
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