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If you own a car or light truck ...or maybe just have paused to wonder while looking out the window of a taxi or bondi ...you might be interested in the mysterious way license plates in Argentina are numbered.

Another thing about patentes here that we yanquis find curious is that different provinces don't have different plates ...like our states do.

The modern method here is so much like my Illinois that I barely noticed.  But there are some variations around town that have caught my eye ...as well as the habit of country people of painting their own plates or just painting the license number directly on their car like aircraft or boats do!  Today I stumbled on an article in Wikipedia that explains it all.

Today's "3 letter/3 number" scheme dates from 1994 when private passenger vehicles were required to display the national plate that we all know ...that is issued in alphanumeric order no matter where you live in Argentina.

Before that, however, there was a national license plate that you can still see sometimes: an all-black plate with nothing more than a white letter followed by 6 white numbers.  Sometimes it was the size of a European plate ...sometimes it was the size used today.

The "letter" was supposed to be the first letter of the name of the province the car was from.  That was cool... except that Capital called dibs on "C" so Córdoba was stuck with "X".  La Pampa took "L" so La Rioja got "F" ...and poor Formosa, the only province that begins with F, was forced to use "P".  Mendoza got "M" but did Neuquen get a "N"?  No.  Missiones grabbed "N"... leaving pobre Neuquen with "Q".  Jujuy, with TWO "J's" was forced to take "Y" in favor of San Juan.

That lettering system may strike you and me as wacky ...but the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) thought it was so good that they still use it today.  And if you look at the postal codes for Argentina, you can see that they survive there as well!

But as you might have guessed, that system was only good for a million vehicles in each province.  Two places exceeded 1,000,000 pretty quick: Capital and Buenos Aires Province.  What to do?  Put the "1" underneath the letter!  That explains a few weird ones like this you might have seen.

For any good yanqui kid who's ever been on a roadtrip, however, the standardized license plate in Argentina is just plain boring.  I wonder if pre-1972 Argentine kids came to regret not having permission to slug their brother in the shoulder upon seeing these two beauties.

Although it probably made it easier for the provinces to simply assume the standard plate and numbering system, any time you lose public graphics like this in your daily life, an angel somewhere has to be shedding a tear.

Not only that, I have a theory that the nickname for Capital, "Baires", comes from those days and the abbreviation at the bottom of license plates like the big one at the top of this post.

One entertaining thing about the current standard is that no combination of three letters is prohibited (unlike countries like Germany where any random combination that smacks of the Nazi era are taken out of the mix.)  That leaves you with plates like ANY 427, BUG 014, CIA 911, FAG 567, FBI 256 and a bunch more.

If, however, you're looking for JEW 711 or even USA 001... we're only up to about INZ 000. 

And there you have the trouble brewing with today's national standard used since 1995.  We've already burned through about half of the available combinations ...and we're pickin' up speed.

Although it's possible to get 17,576,000 variations with three letters and three numbers, plates beginning with RAA to ZZZ were reserved from the start as replacements for older cars with the cool old plates.  New cars started out with AAA 000 on 1/1/1995.

It took 15 years to get to this point and, unless they start re-issuing old numbers, we're gonna need a new system.  The quickest fix would be to add a letter; that would give Argentina an extra half a billion new chapas patentes the same day.