Cape Town, South Africa, is a hot destination for people from inside South Africa, all over Africa, and Europe to take up residence. The cars often come along, and the results can be interesting.
Toyota’s Hi Ace underpins the South African mini bus taxi business and all local Hi Ace’s are assembled here, however this Zimbabwian registered model looks like a JDM import, note the script in the bottom right corner of the first pic. Zimbabwean commercial vehicles have red on white number plates, private cars have black on white. All commercial vehicles there get the red reflective strip. The ‘Driver instructed to stop at railway crossings’ sticker is a good idea, here too people take chances with sometimes grizzly results. The other sticker says something like ’80kms wide main roads, 60kms all other roads.’
The Renault Megane cabrio on the right is a tasty CC option and is carrying regular Cape Town plates. They sold here new in reasonable numbers and I am liking the more and more.. Watch this space!!
This assimilated-to-the-Cape Toyota Corolla AWD wagon is almost certainly an ex-Zim JDM import, note the red reflective strip. Love the rear wing!
This Volvo C70 is from Zambia. Lusaka to Cape Town is 2900kms. While talking numberplates the Holden is locally registered, XXXX-WP is our vanity plate option, and the CBM 571 is almost certainly it’s original plate from the Laingsberg municipality, a town to our north in the Great Karoo.
A closer look at the Zambian plate.
This Toyota Hilux is carrying a Namibian vanity plate, the NA being the fixed part. the Kia Picanto is carrying South African Gauteng Province plates. Johannesburg, the financial centre of SA, is in Gauteng. Most rental cars countywide have GP plates, plus the same goes for many fleet businesses.
This Benz is carrying regular Namibian plates. the last one or two digits denote the town, in this case Luderitz, a small harbour town on the Skeleton Coast. Go search Google images for Luderitz, or Kolmanskop, the ghost town abandoned to the advancing sand dunes.
From Botswana we have this circa 2007 Nissan Elgrand, a posh JDM van. You cant swing a lens in Cape Town without focusing on a CitiGolf..
Also from Botswana we have a ’97 Nissan Elgrand, and below the same car seen elsewhere. Note Botswana plates are yellow background at the back and white at the front. I think that is based on the UK system? Please excuse some of the strange angles, many of these pics are taken from my car.
And from Lesotho another JDM import, a Toyota Spacio. JDM cars are not available to buy in SA, to protect our car industry I gather. It seems they can only be brought in by immigrants. I have tried to read up but there doesn’t seem to be anything definitive. They like to keep us guessing..
To change pace a UK registered 1937 Rolls P111 Arthur Mulliner Sedanca de Ville seen at the 2015 Timour Hall Classic car show, which I have missed for the past two years. This is a lovely show, all sorts are welcome, see below.
Off topic, but when last did you see an original condition Ford Anglia, or an any-condition Mitsubishi Colt??
And lastly, to confuse matters completely, here is a Cape registered VW Synchro that comes from England / is owned by some one called England, and looks like it has spent years on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast.
The use of German FE-schrift fonts seems to have pervaded African license plates and even some South American plates. Malta and Bosnia also use the font on its license plates. Although FE-schrift fonts are functional and prevent unauthorized tampering of numbers and letters, standardizing the use of this font takes away from the “uniqueness” of license plates represented by each country. Thanks for this informative article; I always enjoy reading about license plates abroad.
Yes, I noticed the same thing in South America, too. The Mercusor member countries adopted the FE-Schrift and standardised numberplate size in 2014. Yet, the standardised numberplates are slowly being issued in those countries.
Interesting note about the new Mercusor licence plates is hologram film applied to the letters and numbers as to prevent the tampering or modification.
Same thing is happening here in the US with the recent proliferation of ‘flat’ plates with their homogeneous typefaces. Used to be that you could tell which state a plate was from just based on the dies used for the serial.
A picture of DODGE HUSKY would be really interesting considering how rare they are now.interesting cars by the way.thank you.
Wow Payam! I haven’t seen a Dodge Husky in 20 years! They never sold in big numbers here, and just couldn’t compete against the Hilux etc. For anyone who doesnt know the Dodge Husky was the bakkie version of the Hillman Vogue sedan, which near the end was renamed the Chrysler Vogue.
Thank you!
Growing up in Ontario, we used to see a variety of plates from within Canada and the US states that were in the vicinity (NY, Pennsylvania, Michigan). Sometimes you would see a Florida plate from a car that had been driven up by a Snowbird.
Now I live in Alberta and I see mainly plates from Saskatchewan and west. Not many US plates. An occasional Oregon or California one. Northwest Territories plates are famous for being polar bear shaped.
When in Ontario I used to see a car like an old Ford Escort with California plates and wonder how it got there. I could imagine that drive would have been an ordeal.
The rarest plates in Canada are Mexican plates. I only saw one in Ontario just before I left. It was from Chihuahua state.
I see a lot of Ontario plates in Vermont, on a level with New Hampshire and right behind New York, Massachusetts and Quebec. Maine and New Jersey are probably right behind that, with Florida in there somewhere.
For some reason a lot of rental cars seem to have Maryland plates, and of course U-Haul registers their entire fleet in Arizona.
Maine is a great place to plate-watch in the summer months. You can damn near see all of the states and many provinces.
If you want to see snowbirds migrating, get on I-95 sometime.
I regularly drive it from South Carolina to Georgia, and it is normal to see more Quebec, Ontario and New York plates than SC or GA plates, depending on the time of year.
The snowbirds don’t all use I-95, you can see plenty of Ontario & Quebec, and Michigan and other northern tier states, on I-75 and I-65 as well. As a matter of fact we have learned to avoid travelling on those Interstates at the end of the month as that seems to be when the mass migration of snowbirds occurs.
Here in the southwestern corner of Indiana we see plenty of plates from Kentucky and Illinois as both of those states are nearby and Evansville is a regional shopping destination for some people. I used to work with a woman who moved from Mexico City; she drove her VW Polo here and kept her Mexico “DF” plates for several years.
Thanks Yoshi, types of font never crossed my mind, I really learnt someting interesting!! Like Roger Benest I have a much more ‘how did it get here, why, and where did it come from’ approach to number plates. When I see old cars, survivors, from remote arid parts of South Africa I get quite.. emotional.
I think of Lesotho as a mountain kingdom at altitude with terrible roads but there is a very snazzy Lesotho registered Mini Cooper in my suburb I’ve never managed to shoot.
Living here in Kentucky 7 miles from Ft Knox, I see license plates from all over. I am a delivery driver and put 70 or so miles a day around the area. Have seen all 50 states, including Hawaii and Alaska, and D.C. Also Puerto Rico, Mexico, Ontario, B.C. and Quebec
Some Canadian Forces train here as well, as well as Mexican. And fairly common are US Forces Europe, from returning troops, Noticeable as they are usually smaller and square. Also See German license plates too, from returning GI’s that bought and registered a car while stationed there. Fun license plate spotting!
This was quite a treat to read. I’m a lifelong collector of license plates, so reading about plate-spotting on another continent is wonderful. Many of the plates shown here (Zambia, Namibia) are completely new to me.
Out of curiosity, do all South African vanity plates have a fixed suffix (the Holden and Synchro, for instance have WP at the end)? That’s a practice that I’m not aware of in any North American jurisdiction. Even in states with geographic identifiers in their numbering sequences, vanity plates don’t need to abide by them.
Of the plates here in this piece, I particularly like the Namibian plate from Luderitz. I guess Luderitz is small enough that the numbers are kept very low (like 979 in this instance) — that makes for a very interesting-looking plate in this era of long registration numbers.
Here in the Washington, DC area, we have a wide variety of plates, between the tourists, a generally mobile population, plus government and diplomatic plates. There’s hardly ever a dull moment around here when looking for license plates.
Thanks for this tour of plates and cars from your part of the world!
Hi Eric, thanks for the comments! I did a quick search and cant see any vanity plates in South Africa without the provincial suffix at the end. Interesting point!
Back in 1971, my family and I toured Europe. Based in the UK, we got as far east as Greece and the then Yugoslavia, all on TP & NG (Territory of Papua and New Guinea) number plates.
I sometimes wonder if any numberplate spotters there got the find of a lifetime.
In the EU unfortunately a lot of the different plates are gone, replaced by ever similar styles due to EU regulation, although you can still discern between say an Austrian plate and a Slovak one once you get nearer the vehicle…
That would have been quite a sight to see! I love seeing far-away plates on the roads. I think the furthest away I’ve seen on the road here in Maine was from the Netherlands.
Since you asked I saw an Anglia yesterday there are a few in regular daily use round here but a 1100 Colt not recently no survivors are rare, a friends mother had one years ago she bought it to replace a Morris 1800 that she gave my friend, who in turn borrowed my Humber 80 which was more reliable than the Morris, the Colt was a really good car though.
That car is not a Kia Picanto, it’s a Hyundai i10.