I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac.
I saw a car with a Nunavut plate in Ottawa just the other day.
I’m from Hawaii. People ship their cars to the mainland all the time. It’s no big deal and worth it if it’s a solid, well-maintained vehicle. I think it cost about $2k back in the early 2000s.
Slight hijack/ My SIL and family lived in Costa Rica for a year, it was way, WAY cheaper for them to ship their car there for ~$1000 than to buy or lease anything there.
There’s a family with a Wyoming plate in my neighborhood.
Frequency of various state license plates along my commute route (which takes me past Andrews AFB, a relevant factor) seems to wax and wane over time. Used to almost never see Mississippi plates; now I see them pretty frequently. I see a surprising number of North Dakota plates, but these days I almost never see a Kansas plate.
My WAG is that it has a lot to do with the ups and downs of where the people are from who are driving along Route 4 at the same time I am.
I had Michigan plates on my car when I lived in Mississauga. That’s not uncommon, though, but when I was living in Hermosillo, I took a nice, long road trip through Arizona, Nevada, and California with my Sonora-plated car. I actually find it pretty strange that I don’t see more Mexican license plates in that part of the USA.
I’ve seen Guanajuato plates here in Michigan, usually in Mexicantown, but the most common seem to be Jalisco plates.
Of course in Mexico, you see US plates all over the place, because if you have a US-plated car, the registration never expires until you leave Mexico. They’re usually from Texas or the southwest, though. Once on a trip from Leon, GTO to Uruapan, driving my Michigan-plated Continental, we stopped for coffee de oya at a little roadside place, and there was a currently-registered, Michigan-plated minivan parked there! It was a Mexican family from Grand Rapids, and they were on a road trip to visit their family in Michoacan.
I wish I’d kept my Chinese license plates.
I saw a plate from American Samoa, here in Kansas. This was two or three years ago.
Well, we do have interstate highways here, ya know.
What’s always odd is to see an out-of-state plate here, but it happens. People will often ship their cars over when they move here. I’ve known some.
EDIT: I swear someone who lived close to where we did in Bangkok had Texas plates on their car. I did not go out of my way to meet them.
This actually reminds me that I saw a Ford F-150 Raptor with Chinese license plates in Pattaya one time. The Raptor is/was strictly gray-market in China at the time, and the idea of driving from anyplace in China to Thailand is just, well, ballsy. On top of that, you need a special drivers license in China for a pickup truck.
Although it was odd, it’s also encouraging. I’m a road trip junkie, and my only choices, now that I’m back home, are Canada, the US, and Mexico. I’d just love to drive across eastern Asia.
My folks once drove a car up from the Bahamas.
I think for a long time Europe didn’t get the “good” Mustangs with the big horsepower, maybe he managed to import one of those.
I saw NJ plates in Krakow. I forget exactly what it was now, but it was something expensive & kind of rare, a Maserati or an Aston Martin.
I’ve heard that some of these are actually stolen by organized crime. They can be driven into a shipping container, loaded onto a ship, and headed for eastern Europe in hours, if not minutes.
Did a little voice inside your head tell you “Don’t look back, you can never look back”?
When I was in the Navy I was stationed on a ship out of Pearl Harbor. I opted to have my car shipped to Seattle when my enlistment ended. After a road trip (stops in MT-UT-AZ-OK-KY-IL-IA) I ended up in the Twin Cities (U of MN). Once I had an apartment, I registered the car and put on MN plates. I can remember several times when other drivers honked and gave me the “Hang-Loose” hand signal (rotating the fist with thumb & pinkie extended).
I also had a “I’d rather be riding a mule on Molokai” bumper sticker which stayed on for quite a while after I changed plates. This attracted similar attention.
Surely that’s up to the issuing authority, under the US state’s law, not Mexican law.
When my Dad transferred back to the US from Korea and when I transferred back to the US from Japan we wanted to keep our foreign plates, but we were required to return them to the issuing authority.
Were you tempted to report them as “lost” or “stolen”?
It was also in Krakow that I saw a car with Ontario plates (back in 2013). It was parked not far from my place, and looking at the pictures I took, it seems like it was a Dodge minivan but I’m not entirely sure.
I also remember seeing a car with American plates driving in Krakow a few months later, but I don’t remember the state and what brand and model it was.
Speaking of NJ plates we have them and are wrapping up a ~6400 mile road trip from NJ to MT and ID and back. We saw a total of two other cars with NJ plates, a BMW M2 in lower Michigan (doubly unusual because of the bizarrely, by NJ standards, high % of US brand cars there*) and a Nissan eastbound on I-80 in WY. People from NJ don’t seem to get around much, in their cars anyway.**
But I’ve seen HI plates in NJ time to time.
- we also counted BMW’s since we drive one, actually saw at least one in every state we passed through, though only one or two in some.
**I usually don’t count seeing NJ plates in neighboring states but I saw none today crossing most of PA, eventually close to the border you see them of course.
I don’t know how long ago your sighting was, but it’s not so ballsy anymore. Lots of Chinese now drive into northern Thailand via Laos, so many that they’ve started including Chinese on highway signs.