VehiclesDB

Norway license plate: County letter

Retired 1913 to 1971. Standard plates for car, van, truck, bus, and motorcycle, issued by Statens vegvesen. One of 17 Norway license plates.

Norway license plate, County letter (1913 to 1971), sample O-339
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Format, years and the law

Format
L-999, for example O-339 (L is any letter, 9 any digit)

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

Years issued
1913 to 1971. No longer issued.
Vehicle class
Standard: the default series issued to private road vehicles. Issued for car, van, truck, bus, and motorcycle.
Colours
Characters #000000 Background #FFFFFF
Size
520 × 110 mm · every country's size
How numbers are issued
The letter is the county; the digits are a sequence the county governor (later the police) allocated among the police districts within it. The number followed the OWNER, so a vehicle sold into another county was re-plated. Digit width grew with motorisation: up to 3 digits in 1913, 5 in several districts after the First World War, 6 by the 1960s.

Legal basis and sources

  1. § 2-16: 'Kjennemerke for registreringsordning før 1. april 1971', 'En bokstav og tre til seks tall', the half-height horizontal stroke, and legibility at 30 metres. PRIMARY, and the source of the 1971 end date. https://lovdata.no/dokument/SF/forskrift/1990-01-25-92/KAPITTEL_2
  2. 2026-07-16): the 1 April 1913 start (lov om motorvogner 21 June 1912 + kgl.res. 18 March 1913), the letter-to-county allocation, every design stage above, the colour variants, and the Oslo telefonnummer plates. https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kjennemerke_for_motorkj%C3%B8ret%C3%B8y_i_Norge

Before and after

Norway license plate, Numeric 1899 (1899 to 1913) It replaced Numeric 1899 1899 to 1913 Norway license plate, Standard 1971 (1971 to 1982) Replaced by Standard 1971 1971 to 1982

This plate in your app

The series id is no-county-letter-1913. The API returns its format, validation, colours and designs with the rest of Norway's series:

curl -s https://vehiclesdb.com/api/v1/plates/no \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VEHICLESDB_API_KEY" \
  | jq '.series[] | select(.id == "no-county-letter-1913")'
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