One of the first issues to resolve, when exploring any mechanism for defining languages is the question of how to go about constructing instances of the mechanism which define particular, given languages. Towards that end, note that a strictly 2-local automaton can require a particular symbol to appear at the beginning or end of the string and it can permit particular pairs of symbols to occur in the interior of the string but, in general, it can't require an arbitrary pair of symbols to occur in the interior of the string. Consider, for example the language:

This is just the set of all strings over {a, b} in which the sequence ‘ab' occurs at least once. Since the string aabaa is in L1, any strictly 2-local automaton will have to include at least the pairs:

fia, aa, ab, ba, afi.

But then the string aaaaa will also be accepted, using just the first two and the last one of these pairs. Roughly, as long as we have to permit other pairs starting with ‘a' we cannot require ‘ab' to occur.