Random nattering about license-plate oddities.

[brooksmoses]

Continuing the "reposting random commentary on Dreamwidth" theme, we were talking in a Discord channel about differences in how automotive license places work in the UK and North America. I nattered on a bit, with a couple of personal stories that I thought other people who know me might appreciate:

It's also fun that the "plates go with the car" vs "plates go with the owner" is not completely consistent across states. In Virginia, where I used to live, plates go with the owner. In California, where I moved to, plates go with the car.

Thus cars that have lived their whole life in California often, but not always, have their original plates. There's a certain cachet to having the original plates for collector vehicles, especially the 1960s-era yellow-on-black plates -- to the extent that California now lets you get yellow-on-black plates as special order for an extra per-year cost (though, per current federal regulations, the yellow now has to be reflective).

This was also fun when I moved out here, and took my car to the California DMV to register it. They wanted me to give them the old plates to get new plates (because, to California, the plates belong to the car and a car can only have one set of plates) and I was like, "No, they're my plates, and I want to keep them, which is entirely legal in the state that provided them." So after explaining this to the DMV person, we compromised and recorded them as "damaged, unable to return" or some checkbox like that.

Oh, another wrinkle is that even though California legally requires both front and back plates, some people leave off the front plate. Apparently it's not enforced often enough to be a bother. And apparently there's a grace period where you can drive a new car without plates, or something like that, because probably one out of every thousand or so cars I see on the roads -- always very new-looking ones -- don't have plates at all. I never saw that (or, for that matter, missing front plates) in Virginia.

The other delightful inconsistency among states is whether things like boat trailers need license plates. In Virginia (or, more accurately, when owned by someone living in Virginia), the trailer must have a title of ownership from the DMV and must have a license plate. In Tennessee (or, more accurately, for people who live in Tennessee), there are no titles of ownership or license plates for boat trailers.

I make the point about "for people who live in" because that means a person from Tennessee driving through Virginia with their boat trailer will not need a license plate for it.

We had a situation where a friend of ours from Tennessee loaned us his boat and trailer for a year.

Legally, the trailer was owned by someone from Tennessee and did not need a license plate. But, being owned by someone from Tennessee, there was no title of ownership to prove that it was owned by someone from Tennessee, and we were towing it behind a car with a Virginia license plate. My dad's solution to this conundrum was to avoid towing it on well-patrolled highways.