It should be as easy as ABC to issue licence plates, but not when naughty words are concerned.
Since the current three-letter licence plate combinations were introduced in 2001, the New Zealand Transport Agency has compiled a list of banned three-letter words likely to cause offence or confusion.
Twenty offensive words, including FUZ, GUT, PIG and POX, have been banned by the NZTA, acting under delegated authority from the Secretary of Transport.
A quarter of licence plates banned by the NZTA begin with the letter F, with plates now being issued beginning with the letter E.
Combinations including the letters I and O had also been excluded to avoid causing confusion with the numbers 1 and 0, NZTA spokesman Andy Knackstedt said.
"Anything likely to cause offence or confusion will be excluded," he said.
The new series of three letters and three digits has about 17.6 million possible combinations, but about one in five will not be issued due to allocations to the Personalised Plates company and plates withdrawn from circulation.
The first plate of the new three-letter series to be issued was AAA104, as AAA100 to AAA103 were reserved for personalised plates.
The two-letter, four-digit series, which began on July 1, 1964 and ended on March 12, 2000, had about 6.7 million combinations, but 800,000 of those were never issued.
The three-letter licence plates are expected to last 40 years.
