OK, a history lesson for people. Once upon a time, there was a continent called Europe. In Europe, the license plates all pretty much looked the same from country to country, which would have been fine except that people in Europe like to travel from country to country, which makes the task of identifying vehicles extremely difficult.
So, someone in Europe had a really spiffy idea, which was to use a specified and documented list of codes for a given country, make it into a neat little oval sticker (or placard depending on the particular country's tastes) and affix it to the car. Now, a friendly law enforcement agent could tell that a given license plate (and it's car, obviously) belonged to whatever country was indicated by the country-code in the oval.
And life was good.
Later, some people began to see European cars which had been imported into America, and they were jealous that their German car didn't have a little "D" oval on it, so companies started selling replica oval stickers and placards, so that yuppie scumbags could look all pretentious in their Beemer that now appeared to have been imported from Germany.
But, life was still fairly good and decent.
Then, all hell broke loose, because some morons decided "Hey, why does Germany get an Oval and my podunk resort town doesn't get an oval?" So they would fashion up stickers and start selling them in the local tourist traps. Little ovals that said "OB" or "OBX" on them would start appearing on cars. Of course, since there's no central authority for them, unless you actually lived in the Outer Banks, you had no fucking clue what that stood for, so there had to be a little translation at the bottom of the oval.
And then once one tourist-trap loser-town started doing it, every other tourist-trap loser town realized "Hey, we can sucker convince our tourists to buy those as well!" and there were suddenly hundreds of obscure, meaningless oval stickers stuck to the ass-ends of cars all over the country, none of which had meaning really to anyone but their owners.
This story doesn't really have a happy ending, because now I have to believe that like a full 25% of all the cars I see these days have some stupid little oval on them, and I can't help but think how an actually useful feature was just completely trashed by ignorant morons with no clue.
OK, rant over. I feel better now.
Further evidence of idiocy: Back in the day, our company used to foot the bill for all-expenses-paid trips to Corolla, NC for the whole company. Alas, no more. The first year those annoying OBX stickers came out, the dickhead boyfriend of a co-worker (a true tool) had this cooler that was his low-rent passport of sorts, and he'd get a new sticker wherever he travelled and stick it to his precious cooler.
Except in Corolla that year, he bought one of those plastic static-cling car-window thingies... and could *not* figure out why it wouldn't stick to his cooler. For 20 minutes he worked at getting it to adhere. I can't think of anything but that football-fuckin' monkey whenever I see those stickers. Like, he's the Ambassador of Assheads for his Explorer-driving constituents.
Just one detail: The German sticker has a "D" on it, not a "G".
The country code stickers came from a time when the license plates all looked different. And it's D for Germany, not G.
Just to add fuel to the fire of the idiocy of American euro-stickers, the ones in the Outer Banks actually say "Outer Banx, NC" to go with the "OBX" code.
So not only are the stickers overused and giving off a false euro-cool, they even spell the name of the place wrong with that oh-so-trendy "X".
As Frau Z would say-" Deutschland,Deutschland uber alles!"
Duuude, you need a girlfriend to work off that frustration. ;)
And don't forget: for a promo gimmick a couple years ago, a tech journal included little 'UNX' stickers. I saw a metric pantsload of them for a while (apparently the adhesive was cut-rate).
Can we just apply ferry import taxes to those vehicles just like they do in Europe?
Suddenly those little stickers will become a good deal less appealling.
nice site. look at www.angelfire.com/theforce/country_stickers to see mine!