I haven’t acknowledged Iowa’s 2012 license plate series going into the L’s and we’re already getting close to halfway through. It took the 1997 series until somewhere in late 2002 to get here — six years, vs. nine years this time. What changed? I have hypotheses.
- Americans are keeping their cars longer. See these articles from 2017 and 2o18, and then from two months ago, which says the average age of a vehicle on the road is now 12.1 years. While you can transfer a plate from an old vehicle to a new one, I don’t know what percentage of Iowa drivers actually does.
- The 1997 series was an all-out replacement, including taking out the Sesquicentennial special plates. It took two and a half years to get through replacements of plates issued in 1997-2004, which covered the A’s to the early P’s.
- We are not skipping letters this time around. We have DAA-DZZ and IAA-IZZ, plus other previously omitted characters in the second and third positions.
- The blackout plates, for a time, were vanity-only, taking those vehicles out of the cycle. Incidentally, those plates and the three major-college plates are the only ways to get the late-’90s “Iowa” typography at the top.
- There is a surprising number, or at least surprising to me, of 1997-series plates that escaped replacement for whatever reason.
According to the announcement from 2012, replacements are to be in a 10-year cycle. Theoretically, this will mean that plates issued between April 2 and December 31, 2012, which supplanted the first round of the 1997 series, will themselves be replaced next year. So by the end of 2022, and definitely in 2023, M’s and N’s will be taking out A’s and B’s.
I think the decision from 2012 got a little ahead of itself, and the better regimen would have been something along the lines of “15 years or until the present cycle expires, whichever comes first.” Otherwise, we’ll only have about half the alphabet on the road at any given time — which is similar to what happened with the 1979 and 1986 series since the latter was a continuation of the former.
Then again, if blackout plates are so common as to be almost a second standard, and the dizzying array of specialty options keeps growing, keeping track of what letters are in use may not be as useful.