It’s blatantly illegal. Are people trying to stick it to authorities, or what?
One possibility is that your state DMV (or equivalent) got way behind on issuing new plates during the pandemic and still hasn’t caught up. Getting way behind happened in my state, although I think they’ve mostly caught up by now.
@nearwildheaven It might be useful if we knew what “your area” is?
Plenty of areas have temporary plates which are paper and placed inside the rear window. Did you happen to look there?
My plate got stolen off my car in a parking lot once. Didn’t realize til I got stopped. Couldn’t have been more than a day.
The police were able to ascertain I had legal registration and plates. It was a tedious process to go get a new plate and all that paperwork changed.
I can’t imagine it happens a lot, tho’
There are some Sovereign citizen groups that won’t register or license a vehicle. That could be some.
Maybe it’s just inflation. No one can afford to renew. I’d leave my dead plate on hoping the cop didn’t notice the sticker or date.
I can’t imagine…
This is what I was going to mention. That brand of crazy is selling like hotcakes in some places…
We have the same in my state, but not so many in my city. I was behind someone who had a hand-drawn license plate a little while back, with like, made up info on it.
I’ve also seen one that looks pretty real, but upon inspection is for the “State of Jefferson,” which is a would-be new state made up of rural Southern Oregon and rural Northern California. The Sovereigns and the State of Jefferson people have a lot of overlap.
What authorities? People in my area (DFW) are doing lots of “blatantly illegal” stuff on the roads. Insane speeding, big trucks in prohibited lanes, and sketchy paper (or no) license plates. It has become Mad Max on our roads now.
We used to have this group called “police” and they drove around in brightly contrasting cars with lights and stuff, enforcing laws. But they’ve disappeared. No one knows where they are, but they sure aren’t on the roads.
We traveled for over 3 months last summer, covering 11 different states. We decided to keep track, and saw a grand total of six police cars during the entire trip. Six – in 90 days and over 7000 miles. I used to see that many in a single week just around town.
Yesterday I went and got the new registration for the car. I wonder why I even bothered with it.
In NY, I often see plates that have the paint removed. NYS Thruway went to an electronic system: if you don’t have a transponder, they take a picture of your license plate and bill you. Removing the paint makes it harder to read the photo.
Some drivers use dark plastic to cover the plates. In both cases a cop can read it but a camera cannot.
It’s illegal, but not strictly enforced.
Including the ultimate “if I say so it will magically become true” guy, Steve Jobs .
Wow. Which states were they?
Huh. Here in Chicago I’ve gotten busted for expired plates and expired city sticker in the last two years that were only like a month lapsed. (Just eluded my memory – they’ll eventually come across you here, in my experience. I’ve had maybe a total of five violations in the last twenty years on my stickers. Once was when I went on vacation for a couple of weeks, bought the stickers, and didn’t have a chance to put them on as I wasn’t there to get the mail and put it in before it expired – they dismissed that one though with my proof of earlier purchase.) Which is why I have a note in my calendar for yesterday to get that new license registration sticker. Which, of course, I haven’t done yet. If you leave your car on the street, you can’t get away with it for too long here.
Recent column about the proliferation of expired plates in OR:
I’ve seen both of those. They annoy me because of the obvious attempt at toll evasion.
I think this is the main reason you don’t see a steel plate near the rear bumper. And often times the temporary plate can’t be seen because the window is tinted, or the tape has failed and it fell.
Steve registered his vehicles.
Until recently, California did not issue temporary paper plates when a new car was sold. Instead, you got a small, folded slip of paper that acted as a temporary registration. You’d tape that doc to a lower corner of your windshield. You then had six months to put the real plates on, accounting for the fact that it could take quite a while for the DMV to get around to mailing them.
Steve’s trick was that he bought a new car every six months. So he was never required to put on plates, always being in the grace period.
That’s an expensive way to do things. And a hassle. I mean, who really enjoys the new car buying experience?
Same thing has been happening in my area, for a couple years now. (Iowa) Some cars have a piece of paper in the window that says “IN TRANSIT” but the same paper will stay there for months and months. I think these are the Sov Citizen types, trying to get away with something. But I also see lots of cars driving around with no plate and nothing in the window too. It blows my mind, as I would think they’d get pulled over immediately. But I see it pretty regularly, I’d guess about twice a week.
Jobs just bought the same model of car over and over again. And when you’re that wealthy and buying cars in that price range, I’m sure a single phone call takes care of it. And by that, I mean a phone call to one of the lackeys saying, “Take care of it.”
Folks like you and me that don’t have a team of lackeys can do something similar, which is to hire a broker. Supposedly they are typically able to negotiate enough price reduction to completely offset their fees, plus the reduced hassle has value itself.
On a slightly more on-topic note, I once traded in one red Ducati for another, much fancier model. As my wife has a near total blindspot when it comes to bikes, I figured that since they were both red, she’d never notice. And I was right! At least right up to the time she noticed that my new bike had a dealer ad where a plate should go. She may not know or care much about bikes, but she sure knew what not having a plate meant.
Around here it has nothing to do with sovereign citizens, it’s just a bunch of scofflaws who don’t want to pay for registering their cars. The state of Missouri makes it even easier. In Missouri, you can’t regioster your car or pay sales tax on it at the dealer. When you buy a vehicle, you’re then supposed to go directly to a Department of Revenue office, pay your taxes, and get your plates there. As a result, a lot of drivers drive off the lot with temporary tags and never bother to register the car.
And where are the police? Off doing more important things than enforcing minor traffic violations. If you can find one - the St. Louis County Police Department has 85 vacancies for police officers, the city of St. Louis police has 83 vacancies, and the Missouri State Highway Patrol has 108.
Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. It was a long RV trip, May thru August. I was really surprised at the absence of police, especially in the summertime.
Used to be that way here. I’ve gotten dinged when only a month out of date as well. Now the state DMV has online registration which sends an email one month prior, then you can do it all online. It wasn’t bad before, since new stickers are available at grocery stores, but it was easy to forget the inspection. The only reason I got it at Kroger’s Sunday was to be sure we had it before the next trip.
We still have those, but they’ve been upgraded quite a bit. They’re actually plastic with some type of deep watermark, a big QR code (that police supposedly can read), the expiration date is huge, the car type, dealer and your VIN are also printed prominently on them. It’s my understanding that the new ones are pretty difficult to mimic (but not impossible). Also, the dealer was pretty adamant about getting it back when my real plates came in.