While traveling out of state for a funeral I noticed
that Illinois had an insane number of personal license plates. What state has the highest per capita of personal licence plates?
Osip
I don’t know. But I’ll guess California since the population of L.A. County alone is greater than several states.
I used to have “MY 66MGB” on my '66 MGB. I had “RAT PROD(uctions)” on my old Porsche 924. And “CJ2 EH” on my Willy’s CJ-2A. But then it occurred to me that the way I drive, I’d rather be anonymous.
IIRC from some crazy book of useless trivia that I read in a used bookstore was that Indiana had the most?!? it might have been Illinois but I don’t think so. The book was some trivia game that had around 1000 questions and whoever could answer the most correctly by 2000 won 25000 bucks so maybe somone else saw this book as well?
In Virginia, it seems like half the cars have them.
I agree Elvis.
Maybe it’s because Virginia has one of the cheapest rates for vanity plates: $10/year above the regular registration rate. Virginia also seems to have an insane number of plate variations: plain, historic seal, Jamestown, autumn leaves, Chesapeake Bay, Pet friendly, plus dozens of college and organization seals available. (One I saw when I worked next to the NRA Headquarters was “GL CK” with the NRA logo filling in the center space. Charming, eh?)
Florida seemed to have very few, but then I was driving around the Melbourne/Cocoa Beach area. Probably in Miami the rate goes up.
Supposedly in Illinois criminals are environmentally conscious. Illinois has a license plate with a Cardinal (state bird) on it. Because of the picture the lettering on the plates is smaller than normal. I have heard reports that criminals like these since it’s harder for the police to read their tag number if they’re being chased. (and no…I don’t have a cite…just something I remembered reading somewhere).
Presumably we have more criminal types in Chicago than VA (just a guess) so this may account for some of the vanity plates in Illinois.
I would have to assume that California is far and away the leader in personalized license plates. There are many more cars than any other state and the personalized plates have been around for a long time, close to 30 years.
The California DMV publishes a book of all the combinations that have been used up. The last time I saw it (about 10 years) ago, it was about 500 pages thick and there were at least a couple columns on each page.
A 1992 LA Times article said that the California DMV said that about 6% of California’s 23 million cars have personalized plates (officially called Enivronmental License Plates). That would put the number around 1.38 million plates.
I would assume that the number would probably be close to 1.5 million now.
The California DMV also has a web site you can input your letters & see if its taken or, ahem, too dirty to use.