Saturday 14 February 2015

A Primer On Personalized License Plates

By Cornelius Nunev


Many have considered getting personalized license plates. There's nothing wrong with them, and they lend a little personality to one's car. However, there are several things one ought to know before taking the plunge.

Needing to get some authorization

There is a Word Committee in the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles that is in charge of approving customized license plates submitted by people in VA for their cars, though there is a bit of Orwell humor involved in that name. Melanie Stokes is one of the members of the Word Committee and was in an article with Car and Driver on its site recently.

Before a person can put a custom license plate on their car, they have to submit it for approval and get permission. There are 50 Word committees that approve plates like these.

Attempting to pull a fast one

People think they should be able to put whatever they want on their car if they are paying the car finance company, but that is not how life really works. You probably will not gain much trying to fight the DMV either.

As cute as one person might think it is to have some means of obscenity on their license plate, not every person agrees, hence the reviews. Each state, according to Esquire, sets its own rules and has its own lists of banned phrases and words for license plates. Lists of banned license plates are widely available, which can effortlessly give one an idea that state review bodies do pay attention and will turn down a customized license plate that is too risqu.

The rules of what's allowed and what is not naturally varies and could be totally arbitrary; for instance, according to the Baltimore Sun, the Maryland DMV ruled a personalized plate reading "TOILET" was banned, but one reading "THEPUKE" was not. Likewise, "PIMP" was banned and "FATPIMP" was not.

A lot of people can appeal

However, errors can be made and most states do have an appeals process for people who believe their license plate was disallowed unjustly. Aside from submissions from the peanut gallery, people who want a customized license plate will have to pay personalized license plate charges for their vanity plates.

There are, sometimes, unanticipated consequences. Besides possibly having to deal with people who are offended by a message, innocent or not, other effects of custom plates have been observed, such as in the case of Danny White of Washington, D.C., according to Yahoo. White has vanity plates which read "NO TAGS," which means that he receives a number of tickets every month for cars with no tags, i.e. no visible identification, from multiple states.




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