KUALA LUMPUR: Vehicle licence plates in the Federal Territory will likely have an additional letter or suffix added to it after it winds up with WYY.

As of yesterday, the Road Transport Department website showed that Kuala Lumpur has already reached WVA 1567.

(The letter “Z” is reserved for the military. There are 23 permissible letters for number plates; “I” and “O” are not allowed, too.)

The Transport Ministry is already mulling several proposals, zooming on the possibility of putting an additional letter at the end of the four-digit number.

It will be a move similar to what is being practised in Sabah and Langkawi. However, Minister Datuk Seri Kong Cho Ha said they were in no rush to implement the new system.

“It will be a few more years before we reach WYY.

“There are many ways to deal with the situation,” he said in an interview.

“The current proposal is to put a letter after the numbers. But nothing has been finalised yet.”

Kong explained that there were four more series to go – WV, WW, WX and WY - before the licence plates reach WYY. One series contains 10,000 numbers.

“Multiply the four series with the 23 letters and we are looking at another 920,000 vehicles on the road before we need to change the system,” Kong said.

The Government, he said, had yet to decide on the use of personalised plates for privately-owned vehicles.

Kong said his ministry had also received proposals to improve the quality of driving licences in the country.

One proposal, he said, was to have a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip embedded into the smart licence.

The RFID chip will help verify identification and make it difficult for someone to use a stolen document. Another option, he said, was to make it like the MyKad to prevent it from being easily bent or damaged.