Survivors

For some reason or another, I'm interested by license plates that are used beyond their officially-intended period of use. There are numerous examples of things that fall into this category: Nonreflective Washington plates validated beyond 1985; the occasional blue Pennsylvania straggler; Florida plates evading routine replacement thanks to computer glitches; plus the West Virginia map-base vanities that, during my years of living there, still surfaced on a car with current stickers every once in a blue moon.

Recently I moved to Wisconsin; a state that, with its irregular plate-replacement procedures, would seem ripe for this sort of thing to occur. Here are several examples in that mold (from Wisconsin and otherwise) that I've come across on my own:

First of all, a Michigan plate of the beaded blue variety that, not long ago, was forcibly ripped from the roads. Although all white-on-blue plates (some dating to as far back as late 1982) were ostensibly slated for replacement upon their expirations in 2007, a few of them managed to sneak by into the new year.

The vast majority of these bore "JAN 2008" stickers...more a residual consequence of motorists renewing early (before the new plates were necessarily ready) than anything else. This particular tag, however, managed to be renewed all the way to April 2008...later an expiration date than that on any other blue plate I've seen!

Although this plate managed to buck the trends for a little while, it seems that by now the replate procedure has evidently done its job. The last time I visited Michigan (one month ago), the only blue plates I saw remaining in use were a small handful of non-passenger plates with multi-year validations.

This Wisconsin vanity is another recent collection addition; along with the 1980-base equivalent bearing the same number.

The vanity in question is a plate of the Illinois-lookalike, blue-character variety briefly issued around 1986. In a burst of run-on correspondence on the plate mailing list years ago, someone told me: "All of the Blue vanities were sent new red plates in 1987. Any one that continued to run them, and there were quite few on the road, just were violating the law. Nothing ever happened to them."

Regardless of whether or not "SNAFU 1" received red-on-white plates later on and chose not to use them, an awful lot of blue-character vanities remained in use for years after the fact. This plate was renewed all the way up to 2000; outliving not only a fair number of stamped aluminum compatriots, but also the regular-format blue-character AAA-AZZ series plates, which were replaced in 1993 and 1994.

My final example of a "plate that beat the system" is a Wisconsin passenger example that I spotted just the other day.

This well-worn plate, with the wide dies and vertical dash characteristic of Wisconsin license plates of 1994 and before...complete with late '80s style italicized month sticker...reflects the style that was once numerous on the roads. Replacement commenced in 2000, however, and by around 2005 (IIRC) pretty much anything that wasn't a narrow-die plate from the "P" series on was off the road.

I did a double-take when I spotted this "NJR" prefixed example still in active use with a 2009 sticker: I hadn't seen any plates like this in use for several years! As far as I know, this may be the only one left; at least among legit registrations: I have seen wide-die red-character vanities improvised as replacements for lost black-character front plates, and did see one very curious example of a vehicle with a current black-character plate on the rear and a faded wide-die red-character plate (with different number, naturally) on the front.

The Network License Plates The Idle Pen

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©2008 Andrew Turnbull.
Last update August 7, 2008.