Hong Kong will exhaust its supply of traditional vehicle registration marks with the coming allocation of “ZZ” plates, but transport authorities say they plan to introduce a new series to create 3 million more combinations over the next two decades.
Under the existing system, registration marks are allocated to vehicles using prefixes spanning “AA” to “ZZ” in ascending order, followed by numerals randomly selected and assigned by a computer system.
Authorities are currently allocating marks with the prefix “ZV”.
The Transport Department said on Wednesday that the allocation of the “ZZ” series would start in February or March and would be based on ascending alphabetical order.
The department said that once the series was exhausted, it would start introducing registration marks spanning from “WA” to “WZ” in reverse alphabetical order. The next phase would run from “VA” to “VZ” and so on, it added.
“To date, about 3 million of such traditional vehicle registration marks are yet to be reallocated. It is projected that they are sufficient to meet the demand for about two decades in the future,” a department spokesman said.