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License Plate Gallery

Motor Vehicle Business

Dealerships are issued eye-catching red, black, and white plates for use when moving or demonstrating vehicles. Service facilities are issued black-on-yellow plates, as did dealerships prior to 2004. Both types have been tough to capture, since I usually only see them on vehicles while they're on the move. I guess better pictures will have to be forthcoming...

Commercial Truck

Commercial vehicles in Ontario are issued distinct plates in a rather blah, black-on-white colour scheme. No slogan appeared until the advent of reflectorized plates in 1994. Certain blocks of letters are reserved for buses and farm vehicles (shown below), and the main series was expanded to seven digits in 2011.

The fully-embossed Commercial plates of 1980-94 alternated between wide and narrow dies for the ONTARIO legend. I'm keeping tabs on the variations here.

Unlike many other provinces and states that require truck plates only in certain use cases or above a certain weight threshold, truck plates in Ontario are issued to all trucks...including light pickups and cargo vans. Some light trucks carry an orange sticker with the words "Used primarily for personal transportation;" however, the use of these is inconsistent.

When I arrived in Ontario in 2017, truck plates were being issued in the "AT" series...which also happened to be my initials. I take this as a good omen.

Other Commercial Types

Buses are issued plates in the "B" series, while farm trucks are issued vertically-captioned plates in the "F" series. Also falling into this realm are plates for school buses ("S" series), apportioned trucks ("P" series), and apportioned buses ("BP" series). School bus plates are not mandatory; many operators instead choose to register their vehicles with regular bus plates to allow for expanded use.

An interesting peculiarity of farm plates is that very early examples have the "Farm" legend down the right side. This interfered with sticker placement, so in 1983 the legend was moved to the left side and most of the previously-issued plates were replaced. Yet, I've seen one that sneaked by after all these years...

Trailer

Trailer plates are blue on white (like passenger plates), and are permanent: No stickers or means of revalidation are used. Consequently these plates transfer with the vehicle, not the owner, which saps away the potential for ancient plates to appear on shiny new trailers: Nearly all the plates I've seen of this type have been in the "bookend" A00-00A format, which started in 2002.

Ontario in the 1980s used trailer plates as a vehicle to experiment with reflectorization, and also had some plates manufactured in Quebec. Some of these may still be in use, but they're few and far between.

Motorcycle and Moped

Motorcycles have been issued small blue-on-white plates in a variety of formats over the years, such as 00000, A0000, 000AA, AA000, 0A000, 000A0, and 0000A. The current format is the convoluted, mind-twisting, and unmemorizable "0A0A0" configuration, which started in 2013. Why the MTO did this is anyone's guess.

Ontario issues special plates for mopeds but restricts them to literal motor-assisted bicycles with engine sizes of 50cc or less; as a consequence, these cherry-red plates are very rare. Low-speed motorcycle is a more recent class, covering most of the motor scooters and such that don't fit into the motorcycle or moped categories.

This particular plate offered up an avalanche of confusion. At first glance, it appeared to be a regular sequential number in the AA000 format of 1991 to 1997. But there was a catch: Motorcycles only used the F through L portion of the format, while the M series was reserved for rare (and possibly mythical) off-road vehicle dealer plates:

What gives? Did the MTO backfill the M series as motorcycle at some point? I asked Joe Sallmen, who took one look at the picture and gave a matter-of-fact reply: "It's a vanity. MX stands for motocross; 828 is their competition number." So there you go!

Although the physical constraints of motorcycle plates sap away the practicality of special-issue graphic designs, a veterans' motorcycle plate is available nevertheless:

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