Maybe this is common elsewhere–I don’t know–but I’ve never seen it done.
An online acquaintance reports that on a recent trip to Taos New Mexico he noticed “20 or so” cars with license plates that had been either painted white, painted yellow, or had their paint removed altogether.
Can anyone confirm that this is a New Mexico thing (or a thing anywhere else)?
Some styles of NM license plates are red text on yellow background, and there is layer of plastic overtop. The plastic tends to wear off, and the red paint tends to come off with it/wear off preferentially after it’s gone. I don’t think the pictured drivers are purposely defacing the plates – the plates are just poorly made (and the high desert conditions are probably harsh on them).
Seems reasonable. Can anyone corroborate this?
The two basic styles of plates in NM are red on yellow and red on white. I’ve never seen that kind of wear pattern on the raised portions of the plate, but I suppose it’s possible. You can use the same plate over and over, transferring it from car to car. I believe (but am not sure) that my parents are still using the same plate on a car after 20+ years.
As further evidence, I cite this photo of the wear pattern on a New Mexico license plate. You can see the red paint wearing off of the raised numbers revealing the yellow underneath (and some of the edges of the plastic where it has peeled off).
It’s not certain, but if that plate was still attached to a car, it would probably be on its way to becoming an all-yellow plate without any deliberate intervention, and as asterion notes, some of these plates can be very old (especially around Taos there are some really old cars still on the roads).
red paint on license plate fades, due to sunlight, on those i’ve seen from other states. i think it might not be used for characters by some states for that reason.
I have one of those red on yellow plates on my truck. It’s about 18 years old and there is not much red on it these days. And the yellow isn’t all that great either. But no problems with the law so far. Though I am tempted to replace it with the centennial plate, which IMHO is pretty good looking.
The plates in the linked photos don’t look totally unreadable.
Painting over them strikes me as something we might expect our sovereign citizens to do.
Red paint, ink, whatever, are sometimes called “Bleeding Reds” - it will penetrate most other colors over time
Don’t know why.
Red is the one color where you NEVER paint over (for most pinstriping nowadays, you spray the pinstripe color, then mask the lines, and spray the base color; removing the masking gets you your pinstripe) due to the “bleeding”.
OTOH:
Red also fades very quickly - look at old bumper stickers - esp. political ones with red and blue ink on white paper - the red is in much worse shape than the blue
How’s the paint on the rest of the car? There’s probably so much microscopic grit in the air in that area that anything starts to get sandblasted. It doesn’t take long either. A couple of years ago, I moved to a house that was about five miles from a gravel quarry. Within a year, my windshield was pockmarked with tiny scuffs and chips.
I’ve seen plenty of municipal buses and similar vehicles that tend to be power-washed, (eg: Some guy spraying the vehicle with a 4,200 PSI nozzle) and their license plates are worn down to bare aluminum despite 3M’s valiant efforts to produce retro-reflective coatings that will last for several years.
That’s what I was thinking. New Mexico, desert, windblown sand.
NM does not use a front license plate. It is not unknown for someone to display an old custom plate on the front bumper. Often these are painted to suit the owner’s taste.
On the 20+ year old plates: Around 20 years ago NM added “USA” to the plates, presumably because itinerant drivers had problems with out-of-state authorities failing to know that NM is part of the US. At that point everyone had to buy new plates. This is where a lot of those front bumper plates came from, as the owners didn’t want to pay the setup charge again.
On the paint wear: Most of NM is fairly high altitude. Albuquerque is the same altitude as Denver, and Santa Fe is a little higher yet. Thinner atmosphere, along with a lot less water haze (100+ mi visibility days are common) means the UV is pretty fierce, and that is very hard on paint, plastic, and skin.
I’ve seen a lot of city busses up here in Canada where the license is almost down to the bare metal. Looks a lot like the linked photo only worse - presumably these busses get washed every few days with those standard automatic carwash spinning giant brushes. With the amount of dirt on the plates, eventually the paint scours off.
I imagine the dust-and-cleaning problem is similar in NM, and the license plates suffer more than car clear coat, especially as new cars get old license plates?
Also, in some places dashboard cams and red light cameras 9and photo radar) will use flash at night to read licenses. Many licenses are made with highly reflective paint (ie. the letters are non-reflective and the rest is reflective to enhance readability). Either (a) that reflective stuff wears off faster or (b) some people pain over the reflective tor educe the likelihood of readable photographs. Does NM have photo radar or red light cameras?
Except in the post-credits teaser for the Thor movie, the car Agent Coulson has a conspicuously-displayed NM license plate on the front. I can accept dimension-traveling Norse gods with magic hammers, but that totally killed the realism for me.
That seems like poor planning for an item the people involved must have realized were going to be used almost exclusively in a desert environment.
The plastic overlay was poor planning, I believe. The balloon license plates, in addition to being butt-ugly and difficult to read, also fade dramatically. The better-looking red-on-yellow plates have the plastic bubbles (my own 2002 car is showing signs of this). It remains to be seen how the centennial yellow-on-turquoise plates (which are really lovely but not as readable as the standard red-on-yellow ones) will wear over time.
Looking at the pictures in the blog, I’d say that’s just the effect of fading and peeling on the plates. Once the plastic bubbles off the letters and numbers, the red paint fades away almost completely.
The paint on my car, a 2002 silver Sentra, hasn’t weathered any better than the license plate, but given the experience of other Sentra owners I’ve talked to, that’s a defect in the Nissan paint. I drove a Jeep for 20 years, and its paint didn’t weather at all; the license plate also stayed readable and not excessively faded. I blame the quality of the plates rather than the effects of our weather.
I was thinking that we switched from the traditional made-by-prisoners-in-New Mexico source of license plates to an out of state (Canadian, maybe?) manufacturer at about the time the license plate quality started to decline, but I can’t find any information about it and that might just be New Mexico chauvinism on my part.
That looks different. Better than what they came out with around 2000 at least. I assume it’s based on the unofficial first state flag.
And what is the deal with these front plates from states that don’t use them? Once Upon a Time did it several times with Pennsylvania plates.
And Albuquerque did have both photo radar and red light cameras. I know the red light cameras have been removed, but I’m not sure about the radar. Does Las Cruces have any in operation, Dag?
