I know that some states like Indiana have county specific prefixes, but our plates are the same regardless of your location in the state. It’s about 300 miles from Chester to Bluefield and 350 from Harper’s Ferry to Huntington, so there’s a lot of distance in where exactly in the state you reside. There’s also a linguistic and cultural divide about halfway down the state, so residing on one side or the other of the divide actually says a lot about you, so having a dealer sticker from Beckley as an example would tell you a lot about a person as opposed to a sticker from Morgantown.
I spent 25 years in newspapers, and advertising isn’t given away. I insist my cars have no dealer tags, written in the purchase agreement. If the dealer wants space on my car to advertise they can buy that space. It’s negotiable, yeah, but no dealer has tried
In my neighborhood, the figures would be skewed, as that are a large number of company cars. Pretty much anything starting with BCU and an April sticker mean that they’re company cars, with no license plate frame. There are seven of us on our humble HOA board, and five of us work for the same company!
It does seem to vary by neighborhood. Where my child’s daycare is, there’s a lot more second- and third-hand vehicles, and there’s very few dealer plate frames there. I didn’t do a full survey, but I’d guess maybe 20% there at most. Driving around, I feel like it’s around 50-50, now that I’ve been paying attention to it.
Coincidentally, my wife just got back from Madison, Wisconsin, with a car she bought while out there for work, and it has a dealer frame on it, too.
Yeah, seriously. Who wants to go through life being a shill for a car dealer.
Car dealers are stupid, they spend money on advertising in a way that makes no difference. People don’t decide to go to a specific dealership because they saw it on the bumper of a car. They see the national car commercials and if interested look for the nearest dealer. They are wasting their time and money ruining a car with their branding, only to have to have someone else’s branding removed when the car is traded in. The car dealers believe their own hype, thinking they are better than the others when they are all literally selling exactly the same thing.
License plate frames are easy enough to remove. When I bought my last vehicle, I actually changed my mind about the car I wanted because it had two metal labels bolted to the trunk. I went with my second choice from a dealer who didn’t put junk on the car.