When i was small toddler starting to learn my alphabet, i noticed the new cars in town had licence plates that started with JAA. Older cars like my mom’s Fiat 146 had only two letters, JH. Even older cars had only the letter J followed by the numbers, but these were rare even in my time. In my small town we could see new cars with newly minted plates quite often, as back in those days, Muar was one of only 2 towns in the state with an RIMV (JPJ) office. The other was the state capital JB far far away. I distinctively remember asking my parents about these car registration plates once, probably as a pre-schooler.
‘What comes after JY 9999?’
‘JAA 1’
‘Why not JZ?’
‘Coz Z is reserved for the military.’
‘So what comes after JAY9999?’
‘Well, you change the 2nd letter, so it will be JBA.’
‘And when we reach… er… JYY?’
‘Then we add another letter at the end to be JAAA and start the cycle again.’
I remember thinking it was a pretty cool system, probably impressed more with the novelty of it rather the logistics of it all. Perhaps, not even my parents envisaged when the time would come for that to happen, maybe because people like us didn’t think that much about the future or stuff like traffic congestion or novelty number plates. It was all in the hazy future.
Fast forward more than 30 years ahead, the our capital city KL is now approaching that milestone. The current plate is past WYA, and it will probably reach WYY9999 in a few months. Next should be WAAA, next? Should be no problem, right?
Well, for a couple of reasons, it may not be so. For one, its too long. Secondly, the first ‘A’ in the plate will be insignificant for the next 20+ plus years, maybe less considering our increasing affluency, but a very long time nonetheless. Maybe it isn’t a big problem to JPJ! And they will still stick to the system, or maybe they will devise another system.
Well, if you ask me, theres a simple solution. Pick another alphabet. Start with F1 or G1 or something. They’ll make tons and tons money auctioning off these 9999 plates, like they did with the WWW series. Nobody has an affinity to the W letter, anyway, if refers to an archaic designation for KL which no one uses anymore (‘Wilayah Persekutuan’).