Written on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 5:34am by Alan Bedenko | 6 Comments

Trivia

After World War II, the United States occupied parts of Germany, and continues to maintains military facilities there. For decades, American military personnel had license plates on their vehicles that clearly and unmistakeably identified them as such:

That all changed in 2000, when special plates made to look from far away identical to German domestic plates. They have a different Euroband with the NATO insignia, and prefixes that are not used by any domestic German plates:

When first issued, one of the prefixes used was “AF”. This was soon discontinued because it was easily understood to mean “American Forces”, and changed to “HK”.

In 2005 the lookalike plates were discontinued, and now US forces based in Germany simply use standard domestic German plates for the city or Landkreis in which the car is garaged.

Please go forth in this day with this useless information that is apropos of nothing.

Photos via Flickr here and here.

Tagged with: , , ,

6 Comments

  1. Adam K. says:
    January 14, 2009 at 9:06 am

    After reading that, I decided that I needed to go back to bed for an hour.

  2. WNYMedia says:
    January 14, 2009 at 9:17 am

    This post has been brought to you by Alan Bedenko, President Emeritus of the Cliff Clavin Automobile Trivia and Asthmatics Society of Western New York

  3. hank says:
    January 14, 2009 at 11:18 am

    Actually, it makes sense. German diplomats get USA diplomatic plates.
    German (or other NATO allies) who send members to the USA get plates for their cars from the state where they are based. At a NATO building in Norfolk, military personnel all have VA plates on their autos.

    Why should the USA have special plates in countries where our servicemen are located? Just another reason for the long repeated lefty point that all nations hate the USA. Like we should give a shit.

    But in Rome—-do as the Romans do seems to make a lot of sense.

  4. mike says:
    January 14, 2009 at 11:41 am

    hank, is your real name joe mccarthy jr? did one of your corn flakes this morning look like a hammer and sickle?

  5. hank says:
    January 14, 2009 at 4:31 pm

    You’ll get your chance to find out, bb balls.

  6. STEEL says:
    January 14, 2009 at 5:30 pm

    I like the wide format Euro plates.

 

You need to log in to vote

The blog owner requires users to be logged in to be able to vote for this post.

Alternatively, if you do not have an account yet you can create one here.

Powered by Vote It Up