Comment by hansjorg
6 years ago
> you'd expect police officers in the EU to be fairly familiar with the standard EU driver's license layout
The common design for all the EEA countries was supposed to be implemented by the members by the start of 2013 according to Wikipedia.
Until 2033 there will be valid licenses that were issued before the common license, so there's still a lot of different designs out there.
Also, the common design, like with passports, provides numbers for the boxes, so e.g. 1 is "Name" and 2 is "First Name" and 5 is your license number with whichever authority issued the license. But it doesn't take a _very_ stupid person to write down stuff that's in the wrong box or not in a box at all when all of it seems like moon language to you.
Probably better to have a machine scan the identity document, not least because the machine can trivially avoid freaking out over "Nick Smith, born 2000-01-04" when the wanted criminal was actually "Mick Smith, born 2000-04-01".