After spending all that money restoring, customizing or just outright buying your ride for the Woodward Dream Cruise, you can't just screw on a license plate that says XBC 1764. No, you have to get a vanity plate that expresses your car's snarky theme.. sans vowels. Below you'll find a sampling of the best vanity plates we ran across while walking up and down Woodward. Enjoy.
Christians looking to evangelize are understandably thrilled with the idea of "I Believe" license plates, nevermind that they may be unconstitutional. While the first amendment protects individuals rights to free speech, the cross and stained glass themed plates with the phrase "I Believe" across the bottom were cooked up by the South Carolina Senator Larry Grooms and endorsed unanimously by the state legislature, and a similar effort is underway in Florida. On those grounds, the plates may constitute a state sanctioning of one religion over another, and that raises the ire of non-Christians and free speech advocates. The group Americans United for Separation of Church and State tossed a yellow flag on the field and blew its lawsuit whistle to block these plates from seeing the light of day, spurring a respectfully blistering outpouring of "you'll burn in Hell, thank you" messages from plate supporters.
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From time to time, license plates wind up with unintentionally humorous alphanumeric combinations. Massachusetts had a run of plates with "POO" as the trailing characters, for example, but th North Carolina DMV's inadvertent pun takes the cake. About 10,000 plates were stamped up bearing the characters WTF before a 60 year old teacher's grandchildren whispered the internets meaning of the acronym in her ear, spurring her to raise the issue. Perhaps they need to surf the web a bit more in North Carolina's DMV offices, but at least anyone offended by his or her tag can get it replaced for free. The best part of the entire debacle? The DMV's own sample image for its website was "WTF-5505."
We'll call this a rumor for now, but there is some rumbling that the current roster of Formula 1 drivers is so fed up with the rise in FIA Superlicense fees that they may go on strike as early as the British GP at Silverstone next month. F1Fanatic is reminding us too that this wouldn't be the first such strike. Drivers refused to race way back in 1982 over similar issues. It's actually a pretty funny story and well worth a click to read.
This current mess all stems from the World Motorsport Council's recent decision to hike fees for that license-to-thrill-at-will that is the FIA Superlicense. True, F1 drivers earn a ridiculous amount of money, but it's the principle of the matter.
As we recently explained, the standard fee for a Superlicense was just €1,690 for a newcomer, with an additional €447 for each championship point scored in the previous season when you returned the following year. The new fee structure now starts at a staggering €10,000 base fee, plus €2,000 per championship point. Kimi Raikkonen, for instance, fresh off his drivers championship last year, will have to pay €230,000, an unbelievable €199,255 more than last year. So it's not surprising these drivers might be upset. Break out the posterboard, sticks and markers lads. Or, you know, take it to court in the off-season so fans don't get really, really sore with you.
It is unlikely that most of us would pay for $400,000 for a personalized license plate. It is also unlikely that most of us are McLaren F1 driver Lewis Hamilton. The plate, "LEW 1S," was purchased by a real estate tycoon named Bob Lewis for under $100,000. When Lewis Hamilton decided he had to have it for his Mercedes SUV, he threw down more than four times that much to whisk it away from Bob. We have nothing against spending whatever you want on whatever you want. However, the plate purchase seems an interesting choice, since one of Hamilton's supposed reasons for leaving England for Switzerland, where he now lives, was to live a quieter, more anonymous life.
James Bond used them to elude Goldfinger's foot soldiers, but now revolving license plates have hit the open market in (where else?) China. Apparently over half of all speeders caught on camera in the south of the country get away scot-free by using false or occluded plates. A basic remote controlled plate switcher costs just 800 Yuan ($115), but more sophisticated gadgets that get the job done in just three seconds cost over twice that amount.
So, would fitting one of these make your vehicle a Q Car?
While fuel prices continue to ratchet up and put a squeeze on all aspects of the world economy, times are flush within the borders of major oil producing nations. So flush, in fact, that several Emiratis found a total of 9.8 million dollars to indulge in low-number license plates at a recent auction. The fascination with distinctive tags is a world-wide phenomenon, but $926,000 for a plate that says "50G" is uniquely asinine. If that's what our last few fillups helped purchase, we're going to bike more.
Have teenagers gone nuts? The Federal Highway Administration is reporting that the percentage of teenagers with driver's licenses is going down. Yeah, decreasing! What is up with that?
When I was growing up, my teenage years focused on just one objective... driving. All I wanted was to get my driver's license. That little card with your picture on it was the golden ticket. You could borrow your parent's car, fill the tank (and grab a candy bar) for $20, and nobody could reach you until you returned. We didn't have cell phones, text messaging or GPS tracking. A driver's license represented freedom.
So, what happened? Experts aren't blaming unmotivated teenagers. Instead, they point the finger at the environment in which we are raising our kids. In today's world, parents are much more likely to chauffeur their teenagers from place to place. Tighter state laws govern when kids can drive, and in many cases legislation has pushed the driving age limit higher. Fewer high schools are offering driver's education classes, forcing parents to pay for more expensive private instruction, and steeper rates are making insurance cost-prohibitive for the high-risk teen-age category. Top it all off with gasoline at more than three-dollars per gallon, and maybe a driver's license just doesn't represent what it used to.
If we didn't know better, we'd think there was a lack of worthwhile ways to spend money on cars; what with all the apparently obscenely rich motorists out there dropping enormous amounts of money on license plates – the one part of the car that the rest of us take most for granted.
After the British tuner who spent $870k on UK's "F1" plate and the sheik who dropped $14.5 million on the UAE's number 1, Frank Vassallo IV of Wilmington, Delaware, just bought license plate number 6 for $675k at auction, and admittedly was prepared to spend up to a million. His family already owns Delaware plates 9, for which they paid $185k at auction in 1993, and number 27. "It's a family thing," explains Vassallo. "It's a Delaware thing." It's an I've got more money than I know what to do with thing, if you ask us. But hey, it's his money.
Some records stay in place for a while, and some are shattered regularly. Records set for obscene spending on frivolity never seem to stay put for very long, however, as there's always someone with more cash to blow on something ridiculous. And so it transpires that after tuning magnate Afzal Kahn paid $870,000 for the F1 license plate in the UK, Arabian billionaire Saeed Abdul Ghaffar Khouri dropped the equivalent of $14.5 million on UAE license plate number 1.
If that seems like a big hunk of cash for a registration number, consider that Khouri, who has yet to decide on which of his assuredly many vehicles he'll mount the plate, was prepared to spend over twice that much – 100 million emirate dirhams, or $30 million – on the plate. The sale took place at an auction in Abu Dhabi, the proceeds from which are earmarked towards assisting victims of traffic accidents. At least it's going to a good cause, then.
