Vanity plate

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (October 2008)

A vanity plate or personalized plate (U.S.), prestige plate, private number plate, or personalised registration (UK) or custom plate or personalised plate (Australia and New Zealand) is a special type of vehicle registration plate on an automobile or other vehicle. The owner of the vehicle will have paid extra money to have his or her own choice of numbers or letters, usually forming a recognisable phrase, slogan, or initialism on their plate. Sales of vanity plates are often a significant source of revenue for North American provincial and state licensing agencies. In some jurisdictions, such as the Canadian province of British Columbia, vanity plates have a different color scheme and design.

[edit] North America

Some vanity plates may resemble regular issue license plates, as this one from Pennsylvania does. It references the number of New York City Fire Department members killed in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

In 2007, the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) and Stefan Lonce, author of License to Roam: Vanity License Plates and the Stories They Tell, conducted North America's first state by state and province by province survey of vanity plates, revealing that there are 9.7 million vehicles "vanitized" with personalized vanity license plates.

The survey ranked jurisdictions by "vanity plate penetration rate", which is the percentage of registered motor vehicles that are vanitized.^[1] Virginia has the highest U.S. vanity plate penetration rate (16.19%), followed by New Hampshire (13.99%), Illinois (13.41%), Nevada (12.73%), Montana (9.8%), Maine (9.79%), Connecticut (8.14%), New Jersey (6.88%), North Dakota (6.51%) and Vermont (6.11%). Texas had the lowest vanity plate penetration rate (.56%).

According to the Federal Highway Administration, in 2005 there were 242,991,747 privately owned and commercial registered automobiles, trucks, and motorcycles in the U.S., which means that 3.83% of eligible U.S. vehicles are vanitized.

Ontario had the highest Canadian vanity plate penetration rate (4.59%), followed by Saskatchewan (2.69%), Manitoba (1.96%), the Yukon (1.79%), and the Northwest Territories (1.75%). British Columbia had the lowest vanity plate penetration rate (.59%).

According to Statistics Canada, in 2006 there were 14,980,046 registered motor vehicles (excluding buses, trailers, and off-road, farm and construction vehicles) in the provinces and territories that issue vanity plates, which means that 2.94 % of eligible Canadian vehicles are vanitized.

Massachusetts vanity plate on a parked motorcycle in Boston. This licence plate would be considered inappropriate in many jurisdictions, due to the presence of an obscene word.

The survey also found that vanity plates are issued by every state and the District of Columbia, and every province, except for Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador.

In some states and provinces, optional plates can also be vanity plates and are a choice of motorists who want a more distinctive personalised plate. However, the maximum number of characters on an optional plate may be lower than on a standard-issue plate. For example, the U.S. state of Virginia allows up to 7.5 characters (a space or hyphen is counted as 0.5 character) on a standard-issue plate, but only up to 6 characters on many of its optional plates.

In some states, a motorist may check the availability of a desired combination online.

All U.S. states and Canadian provinces that issue vanity plates have a "blue list" of vanity plates that contains banned words, phrases, or letter/number combinations. The U.S. state of Florida, for example, has banned such plates as "PIMPALA", while the state of New York bans any plates with the letters "FDNY", "NYPD", or "GOD", among others.^[2] Often the ban is to eliminate confusion with plates used on governmental vehicles or plates used on other classes of vehicles. However, a licensing authority's discretion to deny or revoke "offensive" vanity plates is finite. For example, some U.S. motorists have successfully sued their state governments on that issue under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.^[3]

The "blue list" is not definitive; in general, the agent processing an application for a vanity plate can reject a plate if it is deemed offensive, even if the phrase does not match a banned word exactly. State DMVs have received complaints about offensive vanity plates.^[4] In this case, the DMV can revoke a plate if it is deemed offensive, even if it were previously approved.^[5]

In some cases, a plate that has already been issued can be recalled and stripped from the vehicle's owner if the plate's message is found to be in violation after it has been issued. Some notable cases are:

• In 2002, a Florida man was stripped of his plates that read "ATHEIST", but was then allowed to keep them.^[6]

• A Virginia woman lost her plates that read "HAISSEM" (messiah spelled backwards).^[7]

• In 2007, a South Dakota woman nearly lost her vanity plates that read "MPEACHW" (meaning "impeach W"),^[8] but the decision to remove them was later reversed.^[9]

• In 2009, Jimmy Marr, a longtime member of Eugene, Oregon's controversial Pacifica Forum, was stripped of his plates that read "NO ZOG". Protestors at a Phoenix, Oregon neo-Nazi meeting noticed the plates on Marr's vehicle. The state DMV had initially approved the plate without recognizing it as anti-Semitic.^[10]

• In April 2009, The Colorado Department of Revenue rejected a vegetarian woman's request for a plate reading "ILVTOFU" (meaning "I Love Tofu") as it may be misread as "I-LV-TO-F-U."^[11]

[edit] United Kingdom

This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (October 2009)

Plate made to look like LAMBO on a Lamborghini (spotted in Puerto Banús, Costa del Sol).

In the United Kingdom, number plates are issued by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA). They do not approve personalised registrations if they contain words which are offensive in any widely used language. The DVLA however lately have released more and more previously banned combinations such as SEX and DAM. UK plates have to match certain very strict letter/number combinations - see Vehicle registration plates of the United Kingdom.

Registrations can be sold, or transferred from one vehicle to another, with some restrictions. Originally the only vanity plates allowed to be transferred were ordinary registrations that had been transferred, but in the 1990s the DVLA began selling personalised registrations unrelated to the registration districts.The trade of number plates was started by private dealers, entrepreneurs who saw an opportunity to sell something in demand.

There is some additional flexibility available by using numbers that resemble letters (e.g., S for 5), or by using large black-headed screws to fix the plate to the car to fill in a gap. However, the font style, size, and spacing is mandated by law, making the practice illegal.

Some plates only acquire significance because of particular owners. For example, "COM 1C" was formerly owned by the comedian Jimmy Tarbuck, magician Paul Daniels had "MAG 1C", the 1967 plate "BEL 12E" is owned by the Belize High Commission, and "1 AFG" is owned by the Afghan embassy.

In the UK, there are a large number of private dealers who act as agents selling DVLA registrations, as well as their own stock - often purchased at auction or from private sellers.

[edit] Other countries

A custom plate from Victoria, Australia.

A custom plate from Shemiran, Tehran, Iran which reads 66Q666/Iran 11 (Persian: ۶۶۶ق۶۶/ایران ۱۱).

In Australia the various states offer personalised plate schemes, with some states having a yearly fee to maintain the cherished number. In the Australian states of Victoria and Queensland the proceeds from the sale of custom plates and personalised plates go towards road safety activities.

As of 2006^[update], Austria, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Latvia, Luxembourg, Poland, Slovenia, Iceland and Sweden also allow such license plates.

On November 19, 2007, Dutch MP Paul de Krom proposed that vanity plates be introduced in the Netherlands as well, after having seen them while visiting the United States.^[12] One barrier his proposal would have to overcome would be that the RDW (the Dutch vehicle registration authority) links license plates to the actual cars as opposed to their owners.

[edit] See also

• Category:Vehicle registration plates by country

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: vanity plates

• A gallery of custom vanity plates