I have been asked to look into doing a depreciation schedule for a new client, which includes various kinds of assets such as plant and equipment like cement mixers, brick lifts, a generator set et cetera, as well as a number of motor vehicles. I do not have previous years' tax returns; which has made the job quite difficult. I asked about putting the question about previous tax returns to the client and I was asked the following question:
Can't you just tell the ages of motor vehicles by looking at the number plates?
No.
You can not.
My colleague, who was originally from England, asked a reasonable and sensible question because in His Majesty's United Kingdom (which includes Wales because Wales is vanquished, but not Northern Ireland in this case because it is it's own weird wonderland), you have been able to tell the age of a motor vehicle just by looking at the number plate for a very very long time. Imagine then, my small joy when I found out about the following.
https://www.whichcar.com.au/news/victoria-launches-first-7-character-number-plates-high-end-auction
Victoria will introduce seven-character licence plates for the first time later this month, beginning with a limited, high-end auction targeting collectors and enthusiasts.
The inaugural release, branded “Seven Reserve”, will take place on May 26 at the Park Hyatt in Melbourne, with a small selection of premium plate combinations offered to registered bidders both in person and online.
- Wheels magazine, 25th April 2026
I mean, it's a pragmatic idea but is it sensible? Does it create any new systems? No. Unfortunately. This kills me just a little bit inside.
The very point of having six and seven characters on a licence plate is because you ran out of available combinations. This makes sense when the plate just contains numbers because with six places, that's only 1,000,000 numbers which is not enough. With six places, and 26 letters and 10 numbers, then the total number of possible plates aught to be 2,176,782,336. Clearly there are not 2 billion motor vehicles in Australia, so very obviously the system is broken somewhere.
Proving that I am yet again the master of eejitacious ideas, and half-baked thoughts, I have a proposal which solves the licence plate problem once and for all time. The scary thing is that I didn't even invent the system. This was already a solved problem.
His Majesty's United Kingdom of Great Britain (but not Northern Ireland in this case) has one system which is not only sensible but has many useful features. It can be sporked and tweaked nicely. Their seven place licence plates are of the form: XX YY ZZZ, where X are letters, Y are numbers, and Z are also letters. There are rules about what goes where though, and this is where the system which is quiet genius, should be borrowed.
To wit.
Australia has 9 states and territories on the mainland (yes, I have included JBT). The lead character could be as follows:
Q - Queensland
N - New South Wales
A - Australian Capital Territory
V - Victoria
T - Tasmania
S - South Australia
W - Western Australia
D - Northern Territory (N is already used, so we're using Darwin).
Of the principle cities within the states which aren't being used:
B - Brisbane
C - Canberra
M - Melbourne
H - Hobart
P - Perth
If we keep on assigning lead characters on the basis of import:
Y - Australian Capital Territory
G - Geelong
L - Launceston
K - Kalgoorlie
Already we've assigned 18 characters. If we allocate the other six and don't use I or O because they look like 1 and 0, then we can allocate the 24 letters across the states and territories, such that the big states get four letters, the rest get 3 and the Northern Territory which really only needs one.
Q B X - Queensland
N F J R - New South Wales
A C Y - Australian Capital Territory
V M E G - Victoria
T H L - Tasmania
S U Z- South Australia
W P K - Western Australia
D - Northern Territory
With respect to a seven character number plate, what is really neat is that what follows next is genius. The number plate in the form of XX YY ZZZ has rules about what goes where.
XX at the beginning is the state code (see above) and a following letter which could either be assign just on a random basis, or on a next level down basis to various cities, municipalities and shires.
YY is the Year Code. For any given year, we get two codes; being the year of issue (for 2026 this would simply be 26) and a second code being the year of issue plus 50 (which would mean that for 2026 this would become 76). The reason why this is genius is that the amount of 50 year old motor vehicles on the road are minimal; almost to the point of being negligible. This means that in 50 years' time when the year codes are 76 and 26, that the system automatically effectively creates new available plate combinations purely through the passage of time.
ZZZ as the three tail letters of the plate, are simply letters. They are nothing particularly special.
Provided that we do not use I and O in the letter spaces, then for every combination of header which includes the opening state code, there are 24 x 2 x 24 x 24 x 24 possible combinations. This means that there are 663,552 possible codes. For a big state like New South Wales with four state codes, then this increases to 2,654,208; per year.
If this doesn't seem like enough, remember that the Federal Chamber of Automotive industries reports that in 2025 reports that the number of total vehicles sold for the entire of Australia was 1,241,037 and since we have a system which can handle more than double that per state per year, and about 15 million per year, then this is massively above capacity. In theory, the entire population of motor vehicles in Australia could be replaced every two years and the system would still be capable of handling it.
Had the system been already in place, then if we use my wee ickle Mazda 2 as an example, the licence plate would have read:
NB15NDP
N - for New South Wales
B - for Blacktown
15 - because it was registered in 2015
NDP - as the three letters
Not only does the system tell you what state the car was registered in but it could potentially handle individual Motor Registry offices, and it also tells you the year of registration instantly.
To be fair, I have no idea how Victoria implemented its seven-character licence plates but I bet that they gave no thought to the design of how the licence plates would functionally work in providing information about the car to the world.
Aw well.
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