Every vehicle on the road has a license plate. Most of these license plates are a random assortment of letters and numbers, but some people pay a little bit extra to get vanity license plates. These license plates can say pretty much anything you want as long as it’s within the character limits and doesn’t violate any state guidelines.
Vanity license plate guidelines probably vary slightly from state to state, but a few basics include banning plates that are considered offensive and not allowing someone to get a vanity plate that is exactly the same as another resident’s vanity plate.
What’s considered offensive is not the same to every person. For example, one mom was told her vanity plate was offensive after she had been driving around with that plate for 15 years. Thankfully, the governor stepped in to tell the DMV to back off.
In order to get around the guidelines, some people are a little bit creative. It’s not immediately apparent what they are trying to say through the combination of letters and numbers they choose for their plate. For example, someone posted a picture of a license plate on imgur that some people are calling “genius.”
This California license plate doesn’t even look like a vanity plate at first glance. It looks like a random assortment of letters and numbers. The plate reads “3JOH22A.”
This is definitely a custom vanity plate though, and if the owner had made it more obvious what the plate actually means, it most likely would’ve been rejected by the DMV. You see, the plate looks completely different when you look at it in your car’s mirror. Look at the picture below.
