Earlier quoted context omitted.
The insane practice was allowing "O" and "0" to be used in license plate numbers in the first place. Once you do that, you're stuck dealing with the fallout of trying to distinguish confusing glyphs at distance on a moving vehicle. Many places omit letters that can be confused like this for good reason - e.g. Ontario plates can't have the letters G, I, O, Q, and U.
In the font used for British number plates O and 0 are identical and 1 and I are identical. This link might work for an example: https://www.dafont.com/uk-number-plate.font?text=OO01+III Software that handles number plates needs to take account of this. Not all of it does but the glyphs being identical makes it quite clear where the responsibility lies.
e.g. a prior car we had was FE51 WOC - the O can't be a 0 because of the format requirements. Similarly the 1 can't be an I.