Vanity plate

U.S. President Ronald Reagan's vanity plate, displayed at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library (Never issued due to lack of popularity)

A vanity plate or personalized plate (United States); prestige plate, private number plate, cherished plate or personalised registration (United Kingdom); personalised plate (Australia, New Zealand and United Kingdom), custom plate (Australia and New Zealand) or Wunschkennzeichen ('request plate' in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Czech Republic) is a special type of vehicle registration plate on an automobile or other vehicle. The owner of the vehicle pays extra money to have their own choice of numbers or letters, usually portraying a recognizable phrase, slogan, or abbreviation on their plate. Sales of vanity plates are often a significant source of revenue for North American provincial and state licensing agencies. In some jurisdictions, such as British Columbia, vanity plates have a different color scheme and design.

North America[edit]

A vanity plate in Amarillo, Texas, referencing the Star Wars character Chewbacca

Vanity plates are issued by every U.S. state and the District of Columbia, and every Canadian province except Newfoundland and Labrador.^[1]

In 2007, the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) and Stefan Lonce, author of License to Roam: Vanity License Plates and the Stories They Tell, conducted North America's first state by state and province by province survey of vanity plates, revealing that there are 9.7 million vehicles with personalized vanity license plates. The survey ranked jurisdictions by "vanity plate penetration rate", which is the percentage of registered motor vehicles that are vanitized. Virginia has the highest U.S. vanity plate penetration rate (16.19%), followed by New Hampshire (13.99%), Illinois (13.41%), Nevada (12.73%), Montana (9.8%), Maine (9.7%), Connecticut (8.14%), New Jersey (6.8%), North Dakota (6.5%) and Vermont (6.1%). Texas had the lowest vanity plate penetration rate (0.5%).^[2] Virginia's high rate of vanity plates, in particular, was attributed to the low cost per annum compared to a standard plate: the state charges $10 more for vanity plates than for state-issued plates, compared to $50 more in Maryland and $100 more in Washington, D.C..^[3] According to the Federal Highway Administration, in 2005 there were 242,991,747 privately owned and commercial registered automobiles, trucks, and motorcycles in the U.S., and 3.83% of eligible U.S. vehicles have vanity plates.

Ontario had the highest Canadian vanity plate penetration rate (4.59%), followed by Saskatchewan (2.69%), Manitoba (1.96%), the Yukon (1.79%), and the Northwest Territories (1.75%). British Columbia had the lowest vanity plate penetration rate (0.59%) among those provinces that issue vanity plates. According to Statistics Canada, in 2006 there were 14,980,046 registered motor vehicles (excluding buses, trailers, and off-road, farm and construction vehicles) in the provinces and territories that issue vanity plates, and 2.94% of eligible Canadian vehicles have vanity plates.

Massachusetts vanity plate on a parked motorcycle in Boston

In some states and provinces, optional plates can also be vanity plates and are a choice of motorists who want a more distinctive personalized plate. However, the maximum number of characters on an optional plate may be lower than on a standard-issue plate. For example, the U.S. state of Virginia allows up to 7.5 characters (a space or hyphen is counted as 0.5 character) on a standard-issue plate, but only up to 6 characters on many of its optional plates. In some states, a motorist may also check the availability of a desired combination online.

All U.S. states and Canadian provinces that issue vanity plates have a "blue list" of vanity plates that contains banned words, phrases, or letter/number combinations. The U.S. state of Florida, for example, has banned such plates as "PIMPALA", while the state of New York bans any plates with the letters "FDNY", "NYPD", or "GOD", among others.^[4] Often the ban is to eliminate confusion with plates used on governmental vehicles or plates used on other classes of vehicles. However, a licensing authority's discretion to deny or revoke "offensive" vanity plates is finite, as some U.S. motorists have successfully sued their state governments on that issue under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.^[5] The "blue list" is not definitive; in general, the agent processing an application for a vanity plate can reject a plate if it is deemed offensive, even if the phrase does not match a banned word exactly. State DMVs have received complaints about offensive vanity plates.^[6] In this case, the DMV can revoke a plate if it is deemed offensive, even if it had been previously approved.^[7] The "blue list" may be limited to genuine vanity plates, not covering computer-generated accidents. For example, Florida's famous "A55 RGY" license plate (with the standard drawing of an orange in the middle) looks like "ASS ORGY".^[8] The state of Georgia banned the word "covfefe", a misspelling of the word "coverage" that was coined by U.S. President Donald Trump on his Twitter to its customized plates.^[9]

Self-referencing vanity plate

In some cases, a plate that has already been issued can be recalled and stripped from the vehicle's owner if the plate's message is found to be in violation after it has been issued. Some notable cases are:

In 2002, a Florida man was stripped of his plates that read "ATHEIST", but was then allowed to keep them.^[10]
A Virginia woman lost her plates that read "HAISSEM" (messiah spelled backwards).^[11]
In 2002, a Washington resident's request for the plate "GOTMILF" was approved, but was later canceled because of complaints. Another factor leading to the cancellation was that the applicant gave a misleading meaning of GOTMILF (Got MILF, a slight alteration of Got Milk?) when applying for the plate.^[12]
In 2007, a South Dakota woman nearly lost her vanity plates that read "MPEACHW" (meaning "impeach W"),^[13] but the decision to remove them was later reversed.^[14]
In 2008, a Virginia resident had his vanity plate revoked after having held the plate's registration for several years. His serial, "EATTHE", was embossed on a "Kids First" specialty license plate, which meant that the plate could be interpreted as "Eat the Kids First." Some motorists complained that the license plate could imply child cannibalism.^[15]
In 2009, Jimmy Marr, a longtime member of Eugene, Oregon's controversial Pacifica Forum, was stripped of his plates that read "NO ZOG". Protestors at a Phoenix, Oregon, Neo-Nazi meeting noticed the plates on Marr's vehicle. The state DMV had initially approved the plate without recognizing it as anti-Semitic.^[16]
Tennessee^[17] and Colorado^[18] are among several states that have banned the vanity plate "ILVTOFU." Though the applicants stated the plate read "I love tofu," state authorities argued it could be misread as "I love to F.U."
In 2015, a Texas driver had his "370H55V" license plate revoked after registering it for nearly three years. The plate read "ASSHOLE" upside down.^[19]^[20]
Also in 2015, another Texas driver had his "DV3H KID" plate revoked. It read "DIK HEAD", a respelling of the insult "dickhead", backwards.^[21]
In 2016, a North Dakota resident had his "X32TTU8" license plates taken away after Reddit users noticed that the plate read "BUTTSEX" backwards.^[22]
Also in 2016, Lorne Grabher of Nova Scotia was told that his plate showing his surname - "GRABHER" - was being canceled after 25 years because the public "can misinterpret it as a socially unacceptable slogan".^[23]
In October 2018, Bill Moore, a resident of Dallas, Texas was informed that his vanity plate "LOKHMUP" would be cancelled after a resident reported the plate to the Texas DMV in which the DMV classified the plate as derogatory. Moore had owned the plate since March 2017, the plates meaning was a masculinized version of one of Donalds Trumps "Lock her up" chants directed at Hillary Clinton. ^[24]

United Kingdom[edit]

In the United Kingdom, number plates are issued by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA). They do not approve personalized registrations if they contain words which are offensive in any widely used language. The DVLA however lately have released more and more previously banned combinations such as SEX and DAM. UK plates have to match certain very strict letter/number combinations: see vehicle registration plates of the United Kingdom.

Registrations can be sold, or transferred from one vehicle to another, with some restrictions. The trade of number plates was started by private dealers, entrepreneurs who saw an opportunity to sell something in demand. Originally the only vanity plates allowed to be transferred were ordinary registrations that had been transferred. The DVLA began selling personalized registrations unrelated to the registration districts in 1989. More than 4.2 million registrations were sold during the first 25 years of this initiative, raising over £2 billion for the UK Treasury.^[25]

There is some additional flexibility available by using numbers that resemble letters (e.g., S for 5), or by using large black, yellow or white headed screws to fix the plate to the car to fill in or create a gap (e.g. in the middle of 'H' to make it look like two 1s or Is). However, the font style, size and spacing is mandated by law, making the practice illegal. The font that is used on all new number plates is called Charles Wright 2001, and was first introduced in September 2001 to coincide with the DVLA release of new style DVLA number plates.

Some plates acquire significance only because of particular owners. For example, "COM 1C" was formerly owned by the comedian Jimmy Tarbuck, magician Paul Daniels had "MAG 1C", the 1967 plate "BEL 12E" is owned by the Belize High Commission, and "1 AFG" is owned by the Afghan embassy.

In the UK, there are a large number of private dealers who act as agents selling DVLA registrations, as well as their own stock, often purchased at auction or from private sellers.

Other countries[edit]

A custom plate from Victoria, Australia

A custom plate from Shemiran, Tehran, Iran which reads 66Q666/Iran 11 (Persian: ۶۶۶ق۶۶/ایران ۱۱)

Latvian vanity plate

Finnish vanity plate (Tzar)

In Australia the various states offer personalised plate schemes, with some states having a yearly fee to maintain the cherished number. In the Australian states of Victoria and Queensland the proceeds from the sale of custom plates and personalised plates go towards road safety activities.

As of 2017^[update], Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Iceland, Sweden, South Africa, Swaziland and Turkey also allow such license plates.

German car registration law does not allow license plates such as these, but it is possible to select the two letters after the district designation and up to four numbers thereafter for a small fee. It is common in Germany for car owners to register license plates with their initials and a year or number of significance to them. For example, a man by the name of Jimmy Wales living in Berlin and born in 1966 might opt to register B–JW 1966, providing it is still available.

On November 19, 2007, Dutch Member of Parliament Paul de Krom proposed that vanity plates be introduced in the Netherlands as well, after having seen them while visiting the United States.^[26] One barrier his proposal would have to overcome would be that the RDW (the Dutch vehicle registration authority) links license plates to the actual cars as opposed to their owners. Additionally, vowels are not allowed on Dutch license plates specifically because otherwise license plates could (unintentionally) spell a word, so allowing vanity plates would be a strange match with current law.

In Poland, there is an option to buy an individual number plate for an extra charge. The plate looks the same as the ordinary one, there is a letter showing the country district, then one number and then up to five letters of free choice.

In the United Arab Emirates, regular number plates consist of five digits and one optional character (depending on the emirate). So-called "distinguished plates" have a special combination of digits (12345, 55555, etc.) or less than five digits and are sold at public auctions, the profit of which is used for charities.^[27] Very low numbers fetch very high prices, the record being the number one plate from Abu Dhabi, sold for 52.2 million Dirhams (US$14 million).^[28] In Dubai, plate number one (without additional letter) is registered to the car of Sheikh Mohammed, ruler of Dubai.

On June 15th, 2017, it became possible to apply for a personalised license plate in Norway.^[29] The person registering the plate must complete an online application and pay a fee of 9000 Norwegian krones (about US$1058). If the license plate is considered appropriate and the application is approved by an employee, the applicant will have to pay the fee within a certain time limit. If the fee is not paid, the application is denied and the sign goes back into the pool and can be reserved by others. The service was reportedly so popular that the government's Public Roads website crashed within minutes of launch.^[30]

A Czech request plate. Because the letter O is prohibited, the digit 0 is used instead. It also fulfills the requirement to use at least one digit.

The Czech Republic has allowed "registration signs on request" since January 2017. While standard plates for automobiles, trucks, buses or trailers have 7 characters (grouped 3+4), request plates have 8 characters (3+5). For motorcycles, a standard plate has 6 characters (2+4), a request plate 7 characters (2+5). The whole string has to contain at least one digit. Plates must not contain vulgar or defamatory expressions nor names of authority offices. As with the standard plates, they cannot contain the letters G, O, Q, or W. A single plate costs a CZK 5000 charge, the whole pair CZK 10000 charge, preliminary reservation CZK 500 up to 3 months. When the plate is lost or stolen, a duplicate cannot be emitted.

In fiction[edit]

Some characters in fiction films and television series own vehicles with vanity plates.

This can be used as a comical element, as "OUTATIME" in the DeLorean time machine featured in the science fiction media franchise Back to the Future (1985).
Also, it can display the character's eccentricity or egocentricity. An example is Buck in the action/thriller film Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003), whose Pussy Wagon pickup truck has a "PSY WGN" plate.
The plates also may show whose car it is, as in the Iron Man series, where Tony Stark has plates reading STARK and the number of the car.
The American private detective TV series Magnum P.I. had three personalized number plates; most notably "ROBIN 1" assigned to the red Ferrari 308 GTS/i used by private eye Thomas Magnum. "ROBIN 2" is an Audi and "ROBIN 3" is a Suzuki Jimny.
Two of Roger Moore's TV characters had personalized registration numbers on their characters' cars. Firstly ST1, for Simon Templar 1 assigned to his Volvo in The Saint. This was later assigned to a Jaguar XJS in the 1978 series 'Return of The Saint' which starred Ian Ogilvy. Secondly, the borrowed BS1 for Lord Brett Sinclair assigned to his Aston Martin DBS. This number plate was loaned to ATC by Billy Smart, Jr. for the series.^{[citation needed]}
In the 1980s sitcom Just Good Friends, the lead character, Vincent Iain Pinner, had VIP368 assigned firstly to his motorbike and later his Rolls Royce.
In the popular British sitcom Only Fools and Horses, Del buys "1 DEL" and hopes to assign it to his Rolls Royce when he becomes a millionaire, but in the meantime he attaches it to his bedroom door, in the episode "Time On Our Hands" (1996), it is finally assigned to a silver, 1980's Rolls Royce bought from Boycie's Autos (where he previously bought his bright yellow Ford Capri Ghia). Rodney also has a personalised number plate, "A3 RWT", assigned to his Jaguar.
In the Welsh children's television series Fireman Sam, "J 999" was assigned to Jupiter the fire engine. In Postman Pat, Pat's mail van is registered "PAT 1".
In the Finnish comedy film Lapland Odyssey one of the main characters owns a car with licence plate "TIS-51", read as "tissi", which is "breast" in Finnish.
In Barfly by Barbet Schroeder, Henry Chinaski played by Mickey Rourke is seen bumping a red convertible on purpose reading the plate "KSS MY AS"
In Tom Eberhardt's Night of the Comet, the character of Danny Mason Keenan owns a Mercedes with a plate showing his initials "DMK"
Pixar animated films often have vanity plates, sometimes obvious and sometimes with hidden messages. In Cars, Flo reads SHO GIRL and Doc's is 51HHMD, for 1951 Hudson Hornet Medical Doctor.
In the 1980s action television series Knight Rider, K.I.T.T. had the California-issued license plate "KNIGHT". In one episode in the second season, this license plate was shown to be able to be switched with the license plate "KNI 667" by the push of a button.
In the 2015 movie, Minions, the villain family who give the minions a ride to Orlando's "Villain-Con" sport a 1966 NY tag that reads "LUV 2 ROB".
In the 1980s series LA Law, a California vanity tag reading "LA LAW" is shown in the opening credits.
In the 1980s series Hardcastle and McCormick, the titular character Judge Milton C. Hardcastle drives a 1966 Corvette convertible with a vanity plate that spells "D JUDGE". The other car featured in the series (the prototype "Coyote") sports a (rear-only) plate spelling a more conventional "COYOTE X".
In the 2008 series Breaking Bad and its 2015 prequel series Better Call Saul, the character Saul Goodman drives a 1997 Cadillac DeVille with a New Mexico vanity plate displaying the phonetic "LWYRUP", alluding to the expression "lawyering up". This is in reference to Goodman's archetype as a crooked criminal attorney.