Finland has a new way to identify teenage drivers, and it looks strangely familiar. Starting this month, all 17-year-old driving hooligans in Helsinki must display a yellow-and-green hexagon sticker on the back of their car.
The idea is partly road safety, but also enforcement: 17-year-olds are banned from driving between midnight and 5:00 a.m., and the sticker gives police an easy visual clue that the driver may be breaking that rule.
To North American gearheads, the Finish sticker looks a little like one of those mysterious JDM decals stuck to the back windows of Civics, Integras and drift cars. Turns out that green-and-yellow sticker isn’t a tuning shop in Yokohama. Used all across Japan, those decals actually mean something.
Japan introduced its Shoshinsha or ‘beginner mark’ back in 1972 after police found that motorists with less than one year of driving experience had the highest crash rate. The green-and-yellow ‘new leaf in spring’ had to be displayed front and rear, identifying a rookie driver and warning other drivers to give them room. Japan later introduced other official marks for older and disabled drivers, but the shoshinsha stickers is the star.
The Japanese symbol is simple, colourful and instantly recognizable. It actually looks cool. Finland’s new sticker looks like a 14-year-old drew a hexagon in Microsoft Paint and yelled “Done, dude!” One became a JDM icon copied by tuner kids around the world. The Finnish decal seems unlikely to appear beside a Spoon Sports decal on a Subaru any time soon.
Canada has no national version because driver licensing is handled provincially, but Ontario once flirted with the same idea. In 2011, former legislative page Alex Don suggested that novice drivers should carry a visible identifier after seeing P plates— probationary drivers—during a trip to Australia. Ontario’s proposed version was painfully literal: a big red “P” displayed on the front and rear of the car. The basic idea was the same: tell everyone there’s an inexperienced driver aboard and maybe they’ll show a little patience.
The bill never became law. Marketing-wise, though, that red P was never going to appeal to the Fast & Furious crowd. No leaf. No cool symbol. No JDM mystique. Just a giant red P that looked like somebody failed parking class. Japan understood something Ontario missed: if you’re going to make young drivers wear a badge, better make the badge cool.