I don’t pretend to understand everything. In fact, I often feel like I don’t understand anything, really. I do feel like I can appreciate things, even things I don’t understand, which is fortunate, because that’s precisely the situation I’m in right now. There’s a small part of the grand automotive landscape that fascinates and confuses me, and with all things that fascinate and confuse me, I’d like to share it with you, to spread that fascination and confusion as wide and far as I possibly can. I’m talking about European-style license plate frames.
License plate frames may sound mundane, but I assure you, they are not. Or, perhaps more accurately, they are, but that doesn’t mean they’re still not a little bit weird and a little bit beautiful. Do you know the sorts of license plate frames I’m talking about? As an American, I’m not especially well acquainted with these, but I have seen them before. They’re not quite the same as American-style license plate frames, which are pretty much just decorative; European license plate frames often are the means by which the license plate is actually physically connected to the car.
European plates have no mounting holes in them, like American plates do. You could drill your own mounting holes, but most people seem to prefer these license plate frames to mount the plates. Here’s a little TikTok showing how they work:
@licenseplatetok Replying to @rbeau87 The mystery of European plate frames! ???????? #foryoupage #fyp #licenseplatetok #europe ♬ original sound – Ethan the License Plate Guy
Okay, that all makes sense, right? Sure it does. But what baffles me is just how many variations of these mounting frames there are; from what I can see online, there are unending variations of them, all the same basic size, shape and color, but each seems to have a different pattern of mounting holes.
Look, here’s just a sample of some I found online in a very quick search:
Look at all of those! Why are there so many versions of these, and why are the patterns so strangely complex? I’m not the only one to have asked this, I realized; at least one other person asked this same basic question about 11 years ago on Reddit, and only received one answer, an answer that didn’t really explain much beyond what I already suspected: these mounting plates are designed to be universal, and work on pretty much any car.
Well, that answer explained one thing that didn’t occur to me: some of these that have little round bits held to the rest of the frame by sprues are likely designed to be popped out and used as spacers, if needed. That’s clever.
But I think what I don’t understand is why there are so many strange and highly specific-seeming variations of these frames? If it was truly for universality, wouldn’t something like an even, full-scale grid be a better choice? Something like this?
You could cut the little dividing sprues as needed if you wanted wider or taller holes, couldn’t you? Why are there so many variations of slots and holes and gaps and windows? How does that help? Is this some sort of copyright/patent sort of thing, where each company patents its own particular pattern of holes and slots and orifices so no one else can copy it? But then other companies just make their own variations and patent those, in an ever-increasing cycle of meaningless activity?
I reached out to some automakers for insight, but to no avail. I mean, that makes sense, it’s not really their line of work. And I reached out to companies that make these frames, and one, B2B Fabrication, even got back to me! Here’s what they told me:
“The European license plate frames are a universal fit and I believe it’s a matter of “the more holes the better” to cover as many potential applications as possible.”
I mean, that makes sense, certainly. But it doesn’t really explain the huge panoply of variations?
Maybe these are more standardized than is visually apparent? I’m sure if you stacked these atop one another, there would be a lot of common areas with holes/slots that align. European license plates do have a standard size that is followed in most countries, specifying a plate of 20.5 by 4.3 inches or 20.5 by 4.7 inches. You’d think with most countries having this size of plate, it wouldn’t be hard to make a quite simple universal mounting frame; even accounting for variations in mounting position and body curvature and other factors, that still doesn’t quite explain the bewildering array of holes and slots on these plates; they usually have between 75-100 holes! For what, two to four screws?
I mentioned fascination along with bafflement when I first started talking about these frames, and that’s true. I am fascinated by them, because I think the patterns made are often quite striking and beautiful. They sort of remind me of the work of 20th-century sculptor Louise Nevelson:
They also have an odd city-from-overhead look, or a high-tech/sci-fi look to them. Like a circuit board, perhaps.
I can imagine using these as stencils to spray paint greebling on drywall for a spaceship interior in a low-budget sci-fi movie, and I bet they’d work great. I can also picture combining them with colored backlighting to make control panel-looking surfaces. Here, I put one of them in place of the usual control panel on this famous bit of sci-fi interior design:
That kind of works, doesn’t it?
There must be a reason why these are so bizarrely complex, right? I must be missing something obvious. Even if I never find out exactly why they’re like this, I can still appreciate them aesthetically. So there.
Generative design… Just because someone can.
What you’re not understanding is that when a car is produced for sale in Europe, the manufacturer is required to use a random number generator to determine where to put the mounting holes. (EU Standard 6700-147) This results in different hole spacing for each vehicle produced, even of the same model. To compensate for this multiple different types of mounting frames are needed.
TIL the term “greebling” Thanks!
In OG Star Trek the brightly painted, odd 3d protuberance nonsense scattered about the hallways were repurposed wooden casting forms from bronze sand casting. I have a small collection from the sun shipyard foundry, somewhat famous for producing parts for Howard Hughes Glomar Explorer.
You didn’t even mention the king of license plate frames – the noble Würth. The opening and closing mechanisms are as different as the hole designs.
https://youtu.be/TMTf52VQ-Yw
oh wow; I’ll add that video in there, thanks!
More holes = less material used = less expensive to make
Also lighter weight, I suppose, but that would be a matter of grams
Yeah, add all the holes you need and then keep adding them to achieve maximum minimalness.
Complexify and add lightness?
This LCARS erasure shall not stand! I demand satisfaction, sir. Phasers at dawn, set to stun; this is a family friendly website, after all. TNG was also family friendly except when Remmick’s head exploded; straight up nightmare fuel.
And then the almost complete takeover of the Federation by alien body snatchers never comes up again. Ever. “Hey, remember when the Admiral got taken over by an alien maggot and he kicked Worf’s butt all over the VIP cabin then his head exploded? What a crazy day!” “We don’t speak about it. Consider yourself busted back to Ensign.” “Aww…”
I must admit I did expect a follow-up to this during the series run and when that didn’t happen, thought maybe they would pop up in the Gamma quadrant on DS9 or in the Delta quadrant on Voyager, and finally hoped one of the movies would address it. Still waiting.
I initially had this same reaction but then I wonder if the Okudas would be upset by it.
Just wanted to say LicensePlateTok rules
What’s most strange is that none of them say “Follow me to THE AUTOPIAN!”
[ahem]
I’m from Europe, and I don’t think I have ever seen a licence plate frame. We generally just screw them to the car. Here’s everything you need to attach one to a car in the UK:
https://www.screwfix.com/c/auto-cleaning/number-plate-kits-fixings/cat16760002
I’ve had 25 cars in the UK, and most have held the plates on with M6 plastic screws (white, black or yellow as appropriate) or some double sided tape.
Unlike The US we often have the same plate on for the life of the car. No need to take it off ever.
I think part of the answer to your question is that you are looking at a current EU plate, but not all or Europe is the EU and not all of Europe joined the EU at the same time.
Rear mounting for plates is tough – first you have to account for the different plate geometries for all the places you are going to sell this car (and hopefully that doesn’t change much). Then there’s also lighting requirements, which can be different for different countries.
You’ll see that a lot of cars/SUVs mount the plate on the tailgate because you get a wide flat surface. And you can hide the license plate lamp(s) right next to a trunk release and a rear view camera which is handy.
A lot of trucks and US only vehicles did/do put them inset in the rear bumper – you can imagine this doesn’t look great if you need to have an wide depression in the bumper to fit the plate but then only need a narrow US plate. So this doesn’t work great for internationally sold vehicles.
So the answer is that you have dozens of potential mounting hole spacings for dozens of potential plates geometries. And then the EU decided no more holes on the plates, but they make these brackets to fit all of the dozens of potential spacings on the vehicles.
I worked on a vehicle that was getting a variant to sell in China (which I think had a close enough spacing to the US spacing that it caused issues) and Russia (EU style plate). The vehicle was originally built for North America only, so moving the attachment points would have been a mess. The adapting brackets we made would have been pretty simple, but they needed to account for the lighting requirements, and as you can imagine if you just stick a wider plate on the car the ends don’t get lit. So there was a lot of work to try to tilt the plates a bit and get more uniform lighting without having to change the lenses on the license plate lamps, which would have made a unique variation or required retesting for US/Canada
They look like each one was designed to fit a specific vehicle to start with and then the other holes and slots were added to the design as they encountered new cars with different mounting holes until gradually they filled up the frame but had to leave some room left for strength to withstand the German license plate testing protocols which they use the force of what they calculated to be the average drunken teenager can apply with their finger tips to try to rip it off the cars.