A brief recap: a few weeks ago I’d taken the $155,000 Range Rover I was testing out to run some errands with my wife in Plymouth, Minnesota. I was backing out of a parking space in front of my local Kohl’s when four cop cars came screaming up and “initiated a box and pin on the vehicle,” as the police report says. Hands on their guns, the officers ordered us out of the vehicle, patted us down, and eventually told us the Range Rover’s license plate—New Jersey 34 10 DTM—was stolen, they suspected the vehicle itself was stolen too, and they’d used Flock cameras to track me down over the last two days.
The scenario involving my wife and I is just one of many like it. Thomas noted that the system is 99% accurate today, but it’s performing 20 billion reads a month. That 1% error rate, of which I was a part of in June, makes for two hundred million misreads a month.
Each state has different levels of customization with different background images. I like plate customization, its a form of self expression.
You have bigger problems if you’re relying on a custom license plate to express a personality…
Risk isn’t worth “reward’, especially when you hear things like certain backwards states trying to mandate a default " in god we trust” of other biblical theme so that people then need to opt out intentionally, in turn their vehicles becoming potential targets for zealots and cops to harass.
Just mandate national design with black text on white background
The story goes on to talk about specialty plates and designs with confederate flags.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/434-artistic-license/
Customized images, yes. Overlapping alphanumeric codes (two vehicles with the same sequence?) NO. Maybe it was necessary in the 1960s, but it is long since past time for issuance of alpha-numeric unique identifiers to become… unique throughout the states.
How many digits to we need for 297,500,000 plates (as of 2026).
Plus we should probably include Canada and Mexico, since they have the same sized plates and cross the borders regularly.
Canada also has custom plates and different designs in each province too.
Also unless I’m mistaken, when Britain was in the EU, it didn’t use standardized plates like the rest of the member states, right?
A UK plate is 2 letters, 2 numbers, 3 letters. That’s over a billion combinations.
There are no standard plates in the EU. The only matching thing is the country code on the left side.
That’s a lot closer to standardized than the Canada or the US.
Well, that’s true.
But one fun quirk is that (at least here in Finland) the EU plate isn’t mandatory, you can get a clean one with no country code but then if you leave the country you are required to indicate your country of origin with a bumper sticker. So the automated license plate reader might need to be able to figure out from what country this is, and often that sticker will be stuck to the corner of the rear window.
Also a reminder - there will be no sticker on the front :)
Just in Minnesota, and I don’t even think that’s all of them
Colorado has a ton. I couldn’t find any images showing all of them though, just a couple collections of older plates.
6 characters (A-Z 0-9) gives you 2,176,782,336 combinations.
Even if you take out some confusing combos like O0, 1I, 5S, 8B … 6 characters of 31 different kinds gives you 887,503,681
The number drops even more when offensive words or phrases are removed. Nobody’s getting a license plate that reads P00 A55 or a bad word for black people.
Then make it 7 or 8 characters like most countries have. Its not like that wouldn’t fit on plates. With 8 chars you could remove 2/3 of all combinations and still have an order of magnitude in reserve.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LICENSEPLATES/comments/1ux71nl/the_whole_sqz_a55_story/
Ewwww I’m not reading anything on Reddit
What about 7 characters?
You wouldn’t believe it. Even more!
the formula is number of possible symbols (letters, numbers) S to the power of the number of characters on the plate N, or S^N, so if you add one more character out of 31 possible symbols, then you multiply by (another) 31 available combinations.
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Plates should be standardized. Bumper stickers and other things can be used for personalization.
Says who, you?
I wrote the words, so yes.
Oh, well you’re nobody. They don’t need to be standardized and will remain as they are lol.
The American freedom!
To choose the license plate…
The day is saved
Not the guy you replied to, but plates have a purpose that are not necessarily compatible with Art and personalization. Not defending a broken society, just pointing it out.
They work perfectly fine. I’d argue these custom ones are easier to read and remember.
Honestly there’s no issues if you’re not a flock camera
If the same combination is issued multiple times then no, they don’t work as intended.
The issue here wasn’t that the license plate was too colorful, it was that the missing national standardisation allows for over a thousand cars with the same plate.
Which is why they don’t do that. 1 combination per state
So theoretically you can have the same combo 50 times, but it would be on 50 different state plates which are labeled as such.
You’ve made up a fake scenario that does not occur. There are not thousands of cars with the same plate.
Their purpose is perfectly compatible with art and personalization.
That’s like embellishing a prison camp number with a fun design. That’s not self-expression that’s morbid.
What the actual fuck is this comparison? I’m extremely anti-car, and even I’m wondering what has to be wrong with you.
Incidentally got a chuckle out of me that you’re saying this about what’s often effectively a social green-beard (e.g. plates for sports teams, hobbies, causes, etc.).
Look, I’m not saying we shouldn’t be registering cars I’m just saying a licence plate is intended as a vehicle tracking ID. That’s the whole point. I always considered licence plate customization at best tacky. If I want to add some decals and bumper stickers and such, I’m not going to put it on a state issued ID tag.
For the record, I think customized graphics on your credit/debit cards, check designs, etc. is just as morbid. You don’t “own” these things, they’re not part of your identity, and letting them trick your brain into pretending that they belong to you and are an extension of your “self” by adding fancy designs is kind of gross. They are symbols that reference you, they are not a part of you.
I just think it’s a stupid waste of money. Why would spend 50 bucks yearly on a personalized plate how stupid
I mean it’s not a wrong take, it doesn’t make financial sense.
Everyone here and everyone who gets them knows and understands that.
I didn’t say or even imply you were, and the fact you clarified that anyway is bizarre – because it’d be completely batshit.
Brother, my god, it is a fucking identifier plate on your car; no one’s getting “tricked”, and I don’t know if you can believe this, but people can enjoy making objects into extensions of themselves without becoming slaves to The Man – if you can apprehend that someone in Kentucky who pays $25/year or some shit to signal that they’re into amateur radio isn’t offering up their soul in a plate-shaped vessel on the altar of Rebecca Goodman.
Even if you want to bring ALPRs into this, custom plates existed long, long before we had the technology to turn plates into mass-surveillance tools.
This is so goddamn snobby that it’s painful.
I’m not really concerned what your opinion of me is. You think it’s snobby to not waste money on a stylized government ID? Because that makes sense. If you want to plaster your car in your favourite things, go for it. Live your best life. If you want to paint your car like Lisa Frank exploded in a mist of glitter on it, I’m totally down. But the plate, that’s not ever an extension of you. It isn’t yours and it never was, and the illusion that it is, is kind of sad. But clearly, my opinion isn’t a popular one, so I’ll leave off. We’re clearly not going to agree on this.
If you could read, you’d know I think that it’s fine one way or another and that what’s snobby is your obnoxious attitude toward people who do get one. The difference between you and I is that I see it as a waste of money for me and leave it at that because I don’t pretend to be superior and enlightened when my level of insight that the unwashed masses surely lack is “um, didn’t you know that license plates are tracking IDs?? by the government??? Fucking idiot, Sandra, with your stupid fucking ‘museums are for everyone’ plate with Snoopy on it.”
Got it. You resent other people having values you don’t share.
As you sit here saying those who have values you don’t share are participating in something “gross”, under a “sad illusion”, and “letting themselves be tricked” into doing something that’s “morbid”, “tacky at best”, and akin to “embellishing their prison camp number”. lmao okay
So are you a Mercator or a Robinson kind of guy?
I’m kind of in agreement with him, in that I don’t see the point in paying extra to have an ID on my car that tells The Man more about me than I think they need to know, but I don’t think it makes me a shill or (much of) a sucker if I get them. Everyone, including me, makes less than ideal choices. This poor choice is less egregious than most.
Literally what on Earth are you doing to your license plate that tells The Man more about you in a way that realistically matters? You don’t need your Ashley Madison credentials to create a custom plate.
If you’re worried about dragnet surveillance, I guess it’ll help them when they divide the prison camps by baseball team. If you’re worried about automated surveillance like by ALPRs then, uh, pretty sure the model whose literal entire purpose is to create its own features for classification will find abundant other ways to uniquely fingerprint and extract actual, pertinent information about you. And if you’re worried about targeted surveillance by humans scrutinizing you down to what your custom plate says about you, then god help you, and viva México.
So, you walk into a government agency, and they say, “Thanks for providing this required information about yourself. You can provide more information about yourself to us and everyone you pass while driving your vehicle, for a fee. Remember, the more mainstream your opinion, the more it will cost.” Why would anyone say yes to that proposal? And why would you get up in arms about someone saying they think that’s ridiculous but generally pretty harmless?
If you think the magnitude of information gained is even worth considering for either (or frankly any) party, you’re grossly misunderstanding the scale of the surveillance state or just have really terrible ideas for custom plates. Your plate is inherently already a 100% unique identifier; if you’re worried enough that like six characters of custom text or a chosen design will in any way further government or corporate surveillance, then – and I say this as someone who frequents privacy communities, hates defeatism, and thinks people (myself included) need better privacy hygiene – have fun pissing on a forest fire.
You’re about the whole “fake choice” people get in society thing?
I understand that, but I think you went overboard a little 😅
Sort of, but this is slightly different. It’s an active obfuscation of an externally imposed identity element. A justifiable one in this case, but an external imposition in the first place, and external identity elements should always be held at arm’s length because they tend to get abused.
Incorporating it into your material identity dulls your awareness of the fact this representation of you, isn’t “you”, and how it’s used isn’t up to you. Creating an attachment to it has risks, risks you are inclined to ignore if mentally it’s just another personalized bumper sticker in your perception.
Nike’s new IrisNet profit-sharing plan nicely puts a stylish glow on my shoe logos when the fashionably discreet LaceCam notices the right eyes noticing my shoes, and at this rate I will pay the shoes off in 54 months!
No. Just no.