Why Is No One Talking About the Impending License Plate Crisis?

Back in the day, standard-issue Oregon license plates were in the format ABC 123, but we used them all up. Now we’re nearly through Q of the 123 ABC plates. What will we do once we get to 999 ZZZ? Go back to the old format? Introduce a seventh character? Why is no one talking about this impending crisis? —411 PLZ

Maybe you’ve heard of the Great Year 1000 Panic, when folks in A.D. 999 greeted the prospective ticking over of the cosmic odometer with a societal meltdown that made the Y2K scare look like beer-thirty. The Great Plate Rollover Panic will be like that—but only in the sense that neither panic is/was a real thing.

The A.D. 1000 freakout turned out to be a myth dreamed up by 17th century polemicists; the real millennium passed largely unnoticed. And Platemageddon? Well, it may