Re: good grief
As far as I know, anyone else outside UK only uses letters as a prefix to identify a region.
In that case, please let me correct you. In the Netherlands there is no way whatsoever to determine a region from the license plate. The only information to be derived from it, is when the car was first sold (and assigned a license "number"). On the other hand, there is no confusion between "0" (cipher) and "O" (letter) as vowels aren't used (with the exception of "AA" sometime in the past for the royal house).