VehiclesDB

New Zealand number plate: Standard 2001

Issued today 2001 to today. 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 2001 (2001 to today), sample VIM512
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Format, years and the law

Format
LLL999, for example VIM512 (L is any letter, 9 any digit)
  • characters 1-3: three letters, advancing as the sequence is consumed
  • characters 4-6: the numeral block, 1 to 999

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

Years issued
2001 to today. Still 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; no font, typeface or character metric is prescribed in either instrument, the strongest sourced negative in this file after the missing dimensions · license plate fonts
About this plate
ONE INTERNAL DISAGREEMENT IN THE AGENCY'S OWN PAGE, recorded rather than resolved: its milestone table says the last two-letter registration was issued in April 2001, while its plate description says "The last plate in the series was issued in March 2001". Both are on one page; neither is footnoted; the year is unaffected.
Region code notes
A New Zealand plate encodes NOTHING but its position in a national sequence, no region, no district, no date, no vehicle class. The one historical exception is not a decode: NZTA records that the 1964 rollout was distributed geographically, and that later blocks were occasionally steered to a region, but no allocation table was ever published and none is authored here.
How numbers are issued
NZTA, verbatim: "The new series of three letters and three numbers, from AAA104 ongoing to ZZZ999, offers about 17.6 million possible combinations." The agency publishes no allocation calendar, so a serial gives an approximate era and nothing better. Two published landmarks anchor the low end: the series opens at AAA104 in April 2001 because AAA100-AAA103 were sold as personalised plates first.

Legal basis and sources

  1. milestone 2001, verbatim: 'In April, the last registration in the two letter series is issued in Wellington. The first of the three-letter series available starts at AAA104. AAA100 to 103 are purchased for... https://www.nzta.govt.nz/roads-and-rail/research-and-data/fascinating-facts/number-plates
  2. cl 2(3)(c)(ii) 'any combination of 3 letters, followed by any of the numbers from 1 to 999 (inclusive)', substituted on 22 July 1999 by cl 2 of the Transport (Vehicle Registration and Licensing) Amendment Notice 1999... https://www.legislation.govt.nz/regulation/public/1995/0136/latest/whole.html
  3. reg 33(1)(b) six-character cap; reg 33(4)(b) black on white retro-reflective; reg 33(5) aluminium; reg 39(3) front and rear https://www.legislation.govt.nz/regulation/public/2011/0079/latest/whole.html
  4. 'Ordinary plates are made from aluminium, with black embossed characters on a white retro-reflective background.' https://www.nzta.govt.nz/vehicles/licensing-rego/number-plates

Before and after

New Zealand license plate, Standard 1986 (1986 to 2001) It replaced Standard 1986 1986 to 2001

This plate in your app

The series id is nz-standard-2001. 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-2001")'
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