Number of vehicles: cars 778,000 (1989), trucks and buses 149,000 (1989)
Road information: total: 16,903 km; paved: 16,903 km (including 56 km of expressways); unpaved: 0 km (2002)
Located in the middle east, Israel is surrounded by Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Syria.
The current series of car registrations in Israel are quite similar to their counterparts in the UK. They too have yellow number plates with black lettering and display the country flag and country ID code on the left hand side of the plate. The format of the Israeli vehicle registrations however is slightly different, with no letters being used. The format is DD-DDD-DD, with ‘D’ representing a number. This series came into effect from 1990. The previous series, which was quite similar apart from the fact that there was no flag and had dashes instead of dots between the groups of digits, was released in 1980. The series prior to that was released in 1971 and had light yellow number plates with the format being DDD-DDD. The very first series of vehicle registrations was introduced in 1948 and consisted of three digits in black on a white number plate.
