The standard license plate has a blue box on the left with the 12 golden stars of the European Union above the white
nationality mark D ("Deutschland") for Germany.
The rest of the plate is written in black on a white background, consisting of two sections divided by decals:
The first section (1-3 letters) stands for the county the vehicle is registered in
More than 400 county codes are currently used.
Another 371 can only be seen on older plates, as the states reformed the communal entities.
Between the first and the second section, there are two decals:
The 45 mm (1.75 in) decal below shows the state arms with both the state and county name.
The 35 mm (1.4 in) decal above can be round (rear plate) for the biannual security check or
hexagonal (front plate) for the pollution check. Both show the year and month of the next compulsory check.
The decals of one year have the same color, so the police can easily determine vehicles without valid check decals.
The second section (1-2 letters followed by 1-4 digits) is a serial number.
The total number of characters never exceeds eight, but smaller counties might not allow two letters and four digits.
The first digit is never 0.
A license plate can be reassigned some time after the vehicle was taken off the road.
So you can't determine the age of a vehicle (or a plate) as easily as in France.
But it's not impossible: most new plates in the six counties of Saarland currently have two letters and two or three digits.
WANT TO FIND A CITY CODE FOR YOUR PLATE CLICK HERE