Starting in 2015, California began to offer "1960s Legacy" plates that mimicked the style of the plates from the old Black License Plate Era. While these plates had the yellow-on-black colors of those plates, and "CALIFORNIA" in embossed block lettering like those plates, there are four differences:
Originally, these plates were only issued to cars manufactured during the Black License Plate Era, as part of the "Year of Manufacture" (YOM) program. However, soon after the nostalgia plate program began, they opened it up to all vehicles.
Most people willing to pay the extra $50 fee for one of these black nostalgia plates are also willing to pay to get a personalized ("vanity plate") license number on them. For those who aren't, the standard-issue black nostalgia plates have license numbers that are 6 characters long: One letter, followed by three digits, followed by another letter, followed by another single digit. The three-digit group is advanced first, then the last letter, then the first letter, and finally the last digit. The first letter could not be an A, because those patterns were reserved for things like Firefighter plates. The first letter also seems never to be a Y or Z. In other words, the license number progression went B000A0, B001A0, B002A0, ..., B999A0, B000B0, B001B0, ..., B999Z0, C000A0, C001A0, ..., X999Z0, B000A1, B001A1, etc..
You'll occasionally see a black nostalgia plate with a normal-looking 7 character passenger plate license number, like 8SAM123. Most likely, the cars these are on started out with regular white-with-California-in-trendy-script plates, but then the owner decided (s)he wanted to pay the extra annual fee for a black nostalgia plate; the original license number was stamped onto the new black plate, instead of issuing a new license number.
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