In most countries, you can figure out all sorts of interesting info from license plates. At minimum, the region of the country, and sometimes even the year the car was made. But that doesn't work with Bosnian plates. I spent a long time trying to find a pattern in them when I'd be on roads in Bosnia, until I finally gave up and looked it up. There's no system here at all. Plates are issued completely at random. And that's done on purpose.

After the 1992-95 war, the High Representative for BiH (I talked about him here) noticed that traffic police were giving people a hard time at the borders between Bosnian entities. Cars with "foreign" plates were stopped way more often, they'd nitpick, demand bribes. But even if you managed to get past the police, cars with "foreign" plates often got vandalized, and then you'd have to find a place to polish out the scratches. So in February 1998, they removed regional identifiers from the plates and things got a lot better. Now M57 or K51 or any other combination doesn't mean absolutely nothing.