US Private Number Plates Threatened... Briefly

For those of you who don't subscribe to our Regwise number plates newsletter we thought we'd share a ludicrous little story we saw a while ago.

You may recall a bit of a buzz about number plates censorship in the UK last year. Well, the subject came up again last month, when DVLA got the jitters about plates bearing the character ccombinations 08 WMS and 08 RON. Apparently, if you ignore the zero, and treat the 8 as a letter B, these resemble the Welsh words for "bums" and "breast". Shocking, eh? [rolls eyes and yawns]

Well, DMV officials in the USA have a similar bowdlerist aspect to their personalities, and they also feel compelled to sanitise the content of licence plates - just in case someone should be so shocked and offended that they go mad and turn to communism or give up hamburgers or something...

The Department of Motor Vehicles in South Dakota was so stressed by this huge responsibility that it actually asked the state legislature to ban private number plates - or "vanity plates" as Americans call them. To their great disappointment the suggestion was thrown out by a committee of less sensitive souls. So, South Dakota gets to keep its private plates and the DMV gets to keep acting as censor and thus protecting people from corruption by exposure to the dreadful moral hazard of car number plates.

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