Beginning Nov. 1, 2011, Iowa Prison Industries began manufacturing license plates with a new look for the zero. All license plates containing the numeric zero will now appear as a circle slash zero (AAAØØØ).
This change was implemented to make the alpha-numerics on license plates more easily identifiable for law enforcement and for license plate readers. Plates with the circle slash zero will not actually appear on vehicles until county treasurers have exhausted their existing plate inventories.
The Null Set Zero did not wait until the current alphanumerics were exhausted, however. It started appearing somewhere early in the YY’s.
It’s still very, very ugly.