It’s something you don’t notice until someone points it out: there are a lot of Qs on Colorado license plates. Go ahead, take a stroll around a parking lot. You’ll see.
We counted 12 Qs on one city block alone.
The Colorado Department of Revenue, which manages the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, has the answer.
“Up until about six years ago we used a font on license plates that made it very difficult to distinguish between the letter Q, the letter O, and the number zero and that made it really difficult for especially law enforcement officials to distinguish between those three,” said Lynn Granger, spokeswoman for the department.
Hence, the department chose not to issue plates with either letter to avoid confusion.
Then, right around 2010, Granger said, the department made a change to the Highway Gothic font they use, allowing both Os and Qs to appear more clearly.
Two years ago, the department chose to start issuing the letters.
“We’ve had a rise of about since December 2014 between now and then we’ve had an additional 200,000 vehicles registered in the state of Colorado and of course that’s about the time that we started issuing the Q and the O on license plates so it would make sense that we would have a lot more of those,” Granger said.
The DMV couldn't give us a number of how many plates have Qs.
But we bet you'll see them everywhere now.
Let us know how many you see in a given day. Tell us on social media with hashtag #HeyNext.
