Perlis and R are a numbers story.

R has been tied to Perlis from the beginning and never reassigned. Because the state is small, its plates move slowly. While other prefixes rotated formats over the decades, R kept its original style until 18 August 2018, when it finally stepped into the three-letter era—the last in Peninsular Malaysia to do so.

That delay says everything. R-series plates are scarce by simple arithmetic. Older numbers carry the weight of a series that almost refused to change.