CyberTruck license plate mock October 7th
The California DMV recalled the license plate for Cybertruck, which said “Loloct7” after calling the plate because one organization was anti-Semitic.
FOX -LA
In 1980, Golden State adopted a new numbering scheme for passenger cars’ license plates. It was then followed by three characters, or “1AAA000.”
Considering the sale of new cars at the time, consider that this scheme is for passenger cars only – motorcycles and commercial vehicles have got their own number combination. Don’t forget how Californians love the vanity plate. (In California, license plates remain on cars for the rest of their lives, and alphanumeric combinations are not reused.)
Well, that didn’t work. Sacramento Bee reports that 45 years after the new scheme was implemented, California estimates that by the end of 2025 it will hit 9ZZZ999 (the last possible plate in the sequence). Maybe it’s the buyers are rushing out tariffs, or maybe it’s all people abandoning their Teslas, or maybe it’s the dynamics of the country’s most greedy car buying situation.
California is really crazy. A total of 13.2 million registered vehicles (registered cars!), almost twice the states where the next one lives, and almost twice the states at the bottom of the states owned by Texas and Florida, and 25 cars. In a typical year, Californians buy 10-12% of new cars across the country, usually in a sequence of around 1.7 million. It’s a newer car than France, almost identical to Italy and Canada, and almost identical to the UK and Germany.
(*Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Dakotas, Delaware, Hawaii, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, Road Island, Utah, West
So, what should we do? If we are in charge, we know what we do. If everyone gets a plate of vanity and can’t come up with something witty or interesting enough for our tastes, you’ll be sent to live in Arizona.
The California solution is sadly much more practical. They invert the sequence to the format “000AAA0”. You should start seeing a new sequence appear early next year. Californians should last at least a year or two to buy new cars.
Photo by Getty Images
