Registration review: Taiwan

Vehicle registration plates provide a ubiquitous numbering scheme that's easy to enjoy: just walk around the streets and pay attention. Each country offers its own variant of the form, so in this series I will review each country's registration plates as I encounter them.

These reviews are not scientific and should not be quoted as authoritative.

Introduction

Taiwan's scheme was refreshed in 2012. This review only considers the post-refresh scheme. Older plates are still very common.

Schema

A simple, consistent scheme: AAA-0000. The usual suspects are omitted from the letter prefix – O, I – but Q remains, as we'll see below.

Absurdly, the number 4 is no longer used. I thought this was user preference, as I did see one in the wild. But it seems that the user preference was so strong, they elected to remove it. The plate I saw must have been from an older range.

This broad omission of 4 is common across Asia – it sounds like the word 'death' – as is the equally absurd omission of the West's superstition, 13.¹ (Combined with the fact that the ground floor is represented as 1 means that a room on the 14th floor isn't quite as high as one might hope.)

The scheme allows a theoretical maximum of 24^3 × 9^4 = 90,699,264 plates. Given Taiwan's population of 23.5m people this is a touch under 4 cars each. This doesn't feel like enough, but the most recent plate I saw began CCD indicating that about 10% of plates have been issued in 14 years. So we don't need to worry about them running out.

Special cases

There are special cases for electric vehicles E__-____, rentals R__-____, and so on. I appreciate this additional information being encoded in the plate.

They've also removed a whole bunch of three-letter words from the pool so bad luck if you wanted GAY-0000. Inexplicably, ANT is disallowed. Because that's … an ant?

Issue date

The scheme encodes issue date gracefully: it's pretty obvious by looking at cars that they started at AAA and they're currently somewhere in the early-to-mid-C__s.

This avoids issues of specifically encoding a year into the plate, as we'll see the next time I visit the UK. It also provides a free street game: find the latest plate!

Region awareness

There appears to be no region encoding in the plate. Taiwan is a relatively small island so this probably isn't necessary, but I do like knowing where someone is from.

Schema: 4/5

• Pro: simple, obvious, and consistent.
• Con: no regional coding, the 4 thing, and it feels punitive to have excluded ANT.

Design

A simple plate, stamped metal, black on white in its standard form. I prefer an embossing over a cheaper-looking laminate so top marks here.

The typeface is slightly condensed which looks nice on the plate. But I like a plate to fill the space given for it on the vehicle, and a narrow plate rarely does that.

Theoretically that's a - dash separating the letters and numbers, but it's shown as a dot on most (all?) plates. I would have stretched that out a little, at least on cars where there's plenty of room.

Points for a nice Q

If you're going to use a Q you really have to make sure it looks like a Q. Taiwan is a clear pass in this category.

Markings at the bottom

Apparently they moved the screw holes exclusively to the top to allow for those markings, barely visible, at the bottom. I wouldn't have bothered.

Design: 3/5

• Pro: stamped metal. A nice typeface.
• Con: no other adornments. Kinda plain. Doesn't fill the space.

Summary

Overall Taiwan scores 7/10: not bad for our first entrant. It's an inoffensive plate that does the job without trying to get in your face. I just wish that they'd put a touch more into its design.

Footnotes

1. 13 is not excluded from the registration scheme, to be clear. I refer to its common omission from building floor numbers. ↩