Lei Jun proposed "changing the license plate" at the two sessions. Do you want to change the green license plate on your car?

In 2025, data from various sources show that the penetration rate of new energy vehicles in China will exceed 60%. However, the gradient green license plate that has been hung for nearly nine years since 2016 has once again sparked heated discussion due to a remark by Lei Jun, chairman of Xiaomi.

Recently, Lei Jun, the founder of Xiaomi, called for "optimizing the style of new energy license plates" at the two sessions, believing that the current license plates "green license plates of new energy vehicles have to some extent restricted the design effects of automobile products. Existing license plates do not have intelligent capabilities and are difficult to meet the intelligent development needs of daily travel and traffic management."

The design of Chinese license plates has always been closely linked to the needs of the times. The early "Type 86" license plates imitated the Japanese style, with white characters on a green background and upper and lower lines. Its core purpose was to solve the rigid need for vehicle classification management in the planned economy era.

The "Type 92" blue license plate introduced in 1992 turned to the EU style, with a coding logic of province abbreviation + letters, adapting to the management challenges of the surge in vehicles after the reform and opening up.

The new energy green brand, which was launched in 2016, uses a gradient green color to enhance its environmental protection attributes, but its design is often criticized by car owners as "abrupt color" and "disconnected from the body aesthetics." This is exactly why Lei Jun proposed this proposal at the two sessions.

From a historical perspective, Chinese license plates have always been dominated by functionality, from pure numbers to mixed letters, and then to green plates exclusive to new energy vehicles. Both capacity expansion and anti-counterfeiting requirements have been upgraded, becoming a mirror for the development of China's new energy vehicle industry.

However, with the advancement of contemporary aesthetics, this "function first" design tradition has gradually revealed its aesthetic lag in the era of smart cars.

Looking around the world, license plate design has actually long surpassed the attribute of a simple management tool and evolved into a display window of national culture and technological capabilities. On the Internet, whether it is Japan's white background with green characters, a minimalist style, supplemented by regional characteristic patterns, or the EU's white background with blue edges that allows the embedding of elements such as the flags and emblems of member states, which takes into account both standards and personality, or the license plates that car owners can choose to support public welfare organizations with customized patterns, making the license plates a display window of life, they have become the envy of many car owners, and even the license plate designs in Hong Kong and Macao have become more aesthetically advanced.

In contrast, China's current green license plates, with their highly saturated gradient green color, are intended to convey environmental protection concepts, but they are often criticized for "destroying the overall beauty of the car body" due to the lack of color coordination with modern car design.

Lei Jun's proposal is not simply a call for "beautiful upgrades", but points to a deeper industrial logic. Every iteration of Chinese license plates is essentially a mirror image of an industrial iteration.

Lei Jun's proposal is essentially a call to shift from the "manager's perspective" to the "user's perspective", making license plates an organic part of the smart car ecosystem rather than a "policy patch" that is separated from it. As new energy vehicles carry the ambition of China's high-end manufacturing industry, the design of their "identity cards" may indeed usher in a quiet "aesthetic revolution".

Of course, license plate replacement also faces many practical challenges. There are more than 20 million green license plates across the country, and replacing them is not a small number. The reset of the traffic management system, ETC recognition and other infrastructure behind them is also a huge workload.

In short, the fact that Lei Jun brought up this issue at the two sessions itself means that there is room for public discussion on the issue of license plate replacement. After all, the optimization of new energy license plates is not only a demand for the "appearance economy" under consumption upgrading, but also a concrete manifestation of China's progress from an automobile power to a strong country. Lei Jun's proposal is like a pathfinder. Let us wait and see whether it can inspire a balanced solution of technology + aesthetics.