The seven-character pattern California has used for 45 years will finally run out of combinations in 2025, two years earlier than expected. But America's largest car market has a plan.

It’s relatively difficult to predict precisely when California will issue its last current-style plate, but in June 2024, The Sacramento Bee wrote that the California DMV was sitting on about 18 months’ worth of license plate numbers, pegging the final current-style plate for the end of the year. The system, which started with 1AAA000, will be replaced with its reverse. The new system will consist of three numbers, three letters, and one number, so the first one could be something like 000AAA1 or 001AAA1 or 100AAA1 depending on whether or how they exactly implement the existing “no leading zeroes” rule.


https://www.thedrive.com/news/california-is-running-out-of-license-plate-numbers

Somehow the new plates are going to look "wrong" with that new format.