Plate of the Week: 2003 Commercial Sample
Last week we took a look at a 1970s Prop “1959 Base” New Jersey Passenger plate. This week we look at a circa 2003 Commercial Sample plate.
At first glance nothing seems to be wrong with this Commercial Sample plate from 2003. It has the standard Avery sheeting used at the time and everything seems to be spelled correctly.However, something is a bit odd here.
There are two oddities to this plate. The first is that the letter O die is used in place of the zero die. The narrower dies introduced for use on the new reflective plates in 1992 use a rounded zero, while the letter O die remained basically the same as its wider counterpart. Previously the zero and letter O dies were the same.
This letter O for zero switch can be found on other types of sample plates and it is not known how many of these exist.
So what is the other odd thing about this plate? The XAB-12C format was first issued in 1970. In 2003, commercial plates began to be issued in a XA-123B format. New Jersey tends to make some sample plates using older formats on newer bases. For example, the current boxless passenger samples have been seen with serials of AAA-OOO and ABC-OOO.
So when you next encounter a New Jersey sample plate, you might want to take a closer look at the serial format and to see if the zeros are really zeros.
If you have a plate you would like featured as a Plate of the Week, please contact us or put a photo of the plate in our flickr group and drop us a line.
