VehiclesDB

New Zealand number plate: Standard 1986

Retired 1986 to 2001. Standard plates for car, van, truck, and bus, issued by NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi (the Registrar of Motor Vehicles under Part 17 of the Land Transport Act 1998). One of 18 New Zealand number plates.

New Zealand license plate, Standard 1986 (1986 to 2001), sample ME2415
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Format, years and the law

Format
LL9999, for example ME2415 (L is any letter, 9 any digit)
  • characters 1-2: two letters, advancing as the sequence is consumed
  • characters 3-6: the numeral block, 1 to 9999

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

Years issued
1986 to 2001. No longer issued.
Vehicle class
Standard: the default series issued to private road vehicles. Issued for car, van, truck, and bus.
Colours
Characters #000000 Background #FFFFFF
Typeface
not prescribed · license plate fonts
About this plate
The letter sequence did not restart in 1986: NZTA's first reflectorised plate was MX100, continuing the same run that began at AA100 in 1964.

Legal basis and sources

  1. milestone 1986, verbatim: 'In November, reflectorised plates (black characters on white plates) were introduced.'; and 'The last plate in the series was issued in March 2001.' https://www.nzta.govt.nz/roads-and-rail/research-and-data/fascinating-facts/number-plates
  2. cl 2(3)(c)(i) 'any combination of 2 letters, followed by any of the numbers from 1 to 9999 (inclusive)'; cl 2(2)(a)-(b) the two permitted colourways https://www.legislation.govt.nz/regulation/public/1995/0136/latest/whole.html
  3. reg 33(1)(b), 33(4)(b), the form survives the 2011 recodification unchanged https://www.legislation.govt.nz/regulation/public/2011/0079/latest/whole.html

Before and after

New Zealand license plate, Standard 1964 (1964 to 1986) It replaced Standard 1964 1964 to 1986 New Zealand license plate, Standard 2001 (2001 to today) Replaced by Standard 2001 2001 to today

This plate in your app

The series id is nz-standard-1986. The API returns its format, validation, colours and designs with the rest of New Zealand's series:

curl -s https://vehiclesdb.com/api/v1/plates/nz \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VEHICLESDB_API_KEY" \
  | jq '.series[] | select(.id == "nz-standard-1986")'
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