VehiclesDB

South Africa license plate: WC RA mark

Issued today Documented since 2000. Standard plates for car, van, truck, bus, motorcycle, and trailer, issued by Department of Transport (national) and the MEC responsible for road traffic in each of the nine provinces. One of 20 South Africa license plates.

South Africa license plate, WC RA mark (documented since 2000), sample CY 321655
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Format, years and the law

Format
CL 999999, for example CY 321655 (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
Documented since 2000; the format is likely older than the first year documented. Still 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 × 113 mm · every country's size
  • South Africa license plate, WC RA mark 250×205 mm (documented since 2000)

    WC RA mark 250×205 mm

    standard · 250 × 205 mm

  • South Africa license plate, WC RA mark 250×165 mm (documented since 2000)

    WC RA mark 250×165 mm

    standard · 250 × 165 mm

About this plate
The 1-to-6-figure range is taken from the province's own fee table, which prices discrete numbers by character count from three to six and then "All others"; the six-digit full-length number is conventionally printed 3-3 with a hyphen ("CA 123-456") and no instrument requires that hyphen, so it is not written into the pattern.
How the region is encoded
The LEADING letters are the reg 27(2)(a)(i) registering-authority mark and they decode to the licensing OFFICE, which is a real town-level decode and the most Geoguessr-useful fact in South Africa. Every Western Cape mark located begins with C, inherited from the pre-1994 Cape Province allocation; marks are two or three letters and are MAXIMAL-MUNCH against the digits (CB and CBY both exist, so a parser must take the longest alphabetic run before the first digit). The table is a floor, not a census, an unlisted C-initial mark is unresolved, never invalid.

Legal basis and sources

  1. reg 27(2)(a)(i) 'a combination of letters'; reg 27(3) 'the licence mark ... and figures' https://disasterlaw.ifrc.org/sites/default/files/media/disaster_law/2021-06/%20ROAD%20TRAFFIC%20REGULATIONS,%202000.pdf
  2. westerncape.gov.za https://www.westerncape.gov.za/mobility/service/applying-special-motor-vehicle-number-plates
  3. en.wikipedia.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of_South_Africa

This plate in your app

The series id is za-wc-ra-mark. The API returns its format, validation, colours and designs with the rest of South Africa's series:

curl -s https://vehiclesdb.com/api/v1/plates/za \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VEHICLESDB_API_KEY" \
  | jq '.series[] | select(.id == "za-wc-ra-mark")'
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Nearest to South Africa