The image to the right is by Denis Vermeirre, and is used in accordance with their Creative Commons License (Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0)There's been an interesting development in the games we play with Ontario license plates.
As well as the old game of Bumper Stumpers (remember that?), one game I play (and I know my friend Andrew plays), is trying to log the "highest" Ontario license plate possible. Standard Ontario license plates follow the pattern of four letters, followed by three numbers, with license letters and numbers raised incrementally. I remember when (roughly 1997) there was a mild kerfuffle over the fact that our old license plate system, which used three letters followed by three letters, was running out of 'numbers", as we were nearing ZZZ 999, so what were we going to do then?
The answer, of course, was to flip over to AAAA 000. And, since then, the highest license plate I've seen is in the DA region. According to Wikipedia, as of December 8, 2025, the highest license plate number is DJVP-046. Given that this pattern allows for 456,976,000 variants, it should be about a century or so before we have to update this system with five letters.
(Actually the total number of variations is significantly smaller than nearly 457 million. The letters G, I, O, Q, and U aren't used because they're too similar to each other and to other numbers, and this brings the number of variants down to 21 to the power of four, multiplied by a thousand, or 194,481,000. Legislation also prevents the use of certain letter combinations because they spell bad words or are reserved for government officials. Or both.)
A wrinkle in this game comes in the form of green license plates for electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. When these license plates were introduced, back in 2010, they had green lettering instead of blue, and gave you additional perks, such as the ability to use high occupancy vehicle lanes without the requisite number of passengers. All of the green license plates followed the four letter and three number pattern of regular Ontario license plates, with the exception that they all started with GV ("Green Vehicle" -- although FrancoOntarian drivers had the option of picking up VE license plates for "Véhecule Écologique").
Because the total number of possible GV licenses is significantly smaller than the total number of regular license numbers (441,000), I couldn't help but notice that we were running up the alphabet quite quickly, and I wondered what would happen when we tipped over the edge. A few days ago, I got my answer. I found myself driving behind another electric vehicle with a green license plate, but there was something strange about it. Then I realized: the license plate was in the GWAB 000 format.
I pointed this out to younger child, who shrugged, but laughed when I said, "I guess the guy is driving a Green Whe-hecle." She came up with one better, saying, "It stands for Green Wheels".
But now, in my head, I hear Chekov's voice, referring to the car with the license plate as a "Green Wessel".