New Egyptian License Plates

The Egyptian ministry of interior affairs has decided to change all 26 Million license plates in Egypt. Why? no one really knows?! Changing license plates actually mean that the car registration cards will have to be changed as well. Imagine 26 million license plates and 26 million registration cards, how much will all that cost? and why do so???

In an article published in Al Ahram newspaper 16/2/2008 it stated that the change will be done on various phases the first phase will include Greater Cairo and Alex and that will take around 5 months, then the rest of the country in a second phase that is also supposed to last for another 5 months.

The new plates will be out within months, I heard a rumor that says next August but I am not sure. The ministry of interior spokesman declared that the new plates will be made based on international specs so they cannot be forged. The plates will be fitted on the cars in a highly technical manner that will prevent citizens from detaching them, and if they try the plates will break?!!

The new plates won’t point out the type of vehicle like it used to, you will no more see the word: Prive, Transport, Diplomatic, etc as it currently written on the plates. It will only mention the word Egypt in both Arabic & English. As if we don’t already know that we are in Egypt?!!!! If you take a look at the pictures above you will notice that word Egypt takes a large space of the new plates I think it would have been more logical to write the numbers with a bigger font?!

Instead of the current plates that include only numbers and in some cases contains up to 7 figures the new plates will contain only 4 numbers not including Zero and 3 letters that will give additional information regarding the car. The new plates numbers will be written in Hindi and Arabic numbers and the letters will be written in both Arabic and English?!! Why the heck? I have no clue. I think that the English translation of the Arabic letters looks really dumb and meaningless!!! Look at the picture above? The example published in Al Ahram says: TYS ﺱ ﻱ ‎ ﻃ oh God?!! Imagine if this is your license plate what will your friends say?? How are you Mr. Teez (Teez means Ass in Arabic?!)?!!! hahahahahahaha!!!!! Or your Teez size is 4321 didn’t know that its that big :) ع in English is an A or an E? we write Ali and Emad they both start with the letter ع in Arabic?! T is a ﻃ or a ت‎?!

Why are we insisting to use the Hindi numbers? (٠.١.٢.٣.٤.٥.٦.٧.٨.٩) most of our Arab neighboring countries are using the Arabic numbers, (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) they are clearly readable and less confusing especially when cars are speeding?! But of course we have to be different.

Most of the Arabic letters look alike the difference is usually made using punctuation on the letters which can be very confusing in ticketing speeding cars for example: (ت ‎ ب ‎ ث‎) or (ج‎ ح خ‎) which made many Arabic countries using Arabic numbers only and no letters like for example: UAE, Kuwait, and Jordan. Others are using only Indian numbers and Arabic letters like Saudi with a large font size to be very clear. On the other hand Oman uses Arabic numbers with 2 Latin letters translated in Arabic which looks dumb still?! Traffic soldiers can barely read, now when they had to jot down a 7 digit number they were making allot of mistakes imagine when they have to write down 4 numbers and 3 letters, the result will be a SALAD :)

Anyways the new plates will be 35cm long and 17 cm wide. They will also be color coded: Orange will be for Taxis, Light Blue for private vehicles, Dark blue for Police cars, Yellow for custom cars, Green for diplomatic plates, Brown for commercial vehicles, Red for trucks.

I think that the ministry of interior should have asked a design company to design the new plates for them. I am sure the result would have been better looking plates that are more practical. Which makes it worse this is not the first time we have fucked up design, I heard that they plan to change the new IDs also as the code bar on the current ones is not working?!!