Hawaii · sequential passenger map
Hawaii license-plate format
Hawaii passenger plates use three letters, a space, and three digits. In this atlas the pattern string uses A for a letter slot and 9 for a digit slot. Other characters are separators that appear on the metal but do not enlarge the combination space.
- Pattern
- AAA 999
- Classes
- 3 letters + 3 digits
- Alphabet size
- 26
- Skipped letters
- none modelled
- Combination count
- 17,576,000
- Model year
- 1991
How the map works
Each A slot independently takes one glyph from ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ. Each 9 slot takes 0–9. The product of those bases is 17,576,000 — the size of the sequential space taught here. Hyphens, spaces and dots in AAA 999 are display only.
County coding (Hilo, Honolulu, Maui, Kauai) still colours Hawaiian plates, but the passenger serial taught here is the three-by-three block used on the rainbow design.
Before this map, Hawaii used numeric county stacks. Optional graphics (universities, military, environmental) can look nothing like the sequential passenger die and are not counted in the 17,576,000 figure.
I, O and Q may be sparse. Three-by-three is a small combination space compared with Texas.
Generated versus issued
A string that fits AAA 999 is in-class. It is not automatically an issued plate. Series can skip blocks, retire numbers, or reserve low digits. This essay never queries a motor-vehicle file. See also generated vs issued.