License plates from 199 countries, with region codes, a plate generator and the game A Million Kilometres
Ahead of you on the motorway, a car with a blue band and the letter M at the start of the plate. German, obviously, but from where: Munich or Mannheim? Open License Plates of the World, type M and you’ll see Munich and its district on the map.
Six vans on a campsite car park in Georgia, and you want to guess where each one came from. The flag sometimes helps and sometimes doesn’t: in one country the letters on the plate mean a city, in another a series, in a third nothing at all. So that guessing becomes optional, we collected the plates of 199 countries.
The code on a plate is an address, and you can read it
The section holds 9,415 region codes from 107 countries. In Germany a district code is one to three letters, Ä, Ö and Ü included, and there are more than seven hundred of them. The UK has 446, India 1,287. Every code has its own page: the region, its place on the map and the neighbouring codes. Munich, for example, has MU and MUC on top of M.
The “How to read the plate” block splits a plate into its parts and explains what the eye doesn’t pick up: the two seals between the code and the series are the inspection sticker and the coat of arms of the federal state, an E at the end means an electric car, an H a historic vehicle. The map shows where the region is, and from it you can jump to the code next door.
The international code isn’t always what you think
RU on a plate isn’t Russia, it’s Burundi. ET is Egypt, BH is Belize. And 92 countries have no region code on the plate at all: in Spain, Denmark or Belgium numbers run nationwide, so the plate won’t tell you the region. The section says exactly that, “no region code”, instead of making one up.
Your own plate, as a picture rather than for a car
On each country page a generator draws a plate in the local format: random every time you open it, or with your own text, a name or your campervan’s name. The generator knows which letters a country never uses on plates: Italy doesn’t use O, so it will refuse to draw “OPEN VAN” on an Italian plate but will happily draw “VA 777AN”. You can download the plate as SVG or PNG or send it as a link. Under each one is an honest caveat: this is a picture, not a number plate, it doesn’t go on a vehicle, and it doesn’t mean the combination is available.
Plates aren’t just for reading, you can guess them too
The same database powers the game A Million Kilometres, inspired by “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”, except the prize is kilometres on the clock: from 100 km for the first answer to a million for the fifteenth. The questions are new every time. Guess the country from a plate, find the right plate among four, remember whose sticker CH or RA is, say where a car with this region code comes from. Plates from home – for the English version that means the UK, the US and Ireland – turn up in the middle of the game, not in the final. The final saves its traps for later, like that RU which turns out to be Burundi.
After question 5, 1,000 km can no longer be lost, after question 10 it’s 32,000 km. There are three lifelines: “50:50”, “Ask the campsite”, which shows how other players answered, and “Call a trucker”. At any point you can take the distance you’ve covered and stop, and one link from the game results leads to the plates section.
How the plates are put together
For each country we collected the format, size, history and region codes. The sources are national laws and registers (for Germany that’s gesetze-im-internet.de), Wikipedia and Wikidata; the full list is at the bottom of every page. The plates are drawn by our own engine, each country has its own template, and some countries have separate plate types: taxis, motorcycles and others. The OpenVan.camp Editorial team checks every country’s rendering by hand against photos of real plates. The same data is open via the API and MCP: the plate image, the list of codes and format validation.
What not to expect
The code only shows the region where the car was registered. It won’t tell you the owner or where the car is right now. The font and proportions are close to the real thing, but this isn’t a pressed plate. For some countries in Africa and Oceania there’s less data so far than for Europe. And it won’t make a traffic jam any shorter. You’ll just see that it’s made up of three Munichs and one Nuremberg.