When will Minnesota switch to 7 digit license plates?

[MPLS_TC]

Originally Posted by JohnnyMN

Pretty soon, it's going to become necessary.

No state needs 7 digit/number combinations for their plate. Combining the two you can get around a billion combinations with 6 so the states that have 7 like California don't need to do that because there population is around 37,000,000 and that's not even to 1 billion.

[SpoonieLuv]

Originally Posted by shotz90s

No worries. In 10 years cars will get bar code plates and patrol cars will have grill or dash mounted scanners. The plates will also transmit a signal.

Like someone else pointed out, police departments are already using technology to do this without converting plate info into barcodes. The reason why I bring this up again is the technology developed by a MN company... Tarjay! The video below is circa 2008 I think so this is 'old' in terms of technology.


target creates license plate reading technology - YouTube


It's pretty crazy (scary) what companies like Google and Target are getting into these days.

[Glenfield]

Originally Posted by MPLS_TC

No state needs 7 digit/number combinations for their plate. Combining the two you can get around a billion combinations with 6 so the states that have 7 like California don't need to do that because there population is around 37,000,000 and that's not even to 1 billion.

I am assuming "by combining the two" means using letters and numbers. If so, to exceed the 13,824,000 combinations possible with three of ten numbers followed by three of 24 letters, you would have to allow random combinations of the number and placement of letters and numbers. By adding a number to the front of their plate numbers, California increased the number of possible combinations to 138,240,000. Random placement is a good alternative to seven digits. The only drawback might be whether computer systems are locked into the current format.