According to Kevin Malone, public information officer for the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles, there are 216,739 vanity plates in Nevada, representing 8.4 percent of the cars on the road. To get a personalized (say, "STRLT") plate with a standard background will cost you $44 plus a $20 renewal. If you want to add a customized background, the combination will set you back $97 plus a $50 renewal fee. Of that, $25 and $20, respectively, go to charity. (Renewals are annual.)
Nevada law permits vanity plates of as many as seven characters but as few as four. Neither punctuation marks nor "special symbols" are allowed. To take some of the hassle out of finding out whether your desired combination of letters and/or numbers is available, the DMV has a license-plate search page, which at least gets you started. The department reserves the right to reject any plate request it deems to "carry connotations offensive to good taste and decency, or which would be misleading."
Plate requests can also be rejected if they are found to be racist, ethnocentrist, derisive of someone’s gender or pejorative to religious beliefs. (There are supposed to be 15,000 banned plates on the DMV registry, some as seemingly innocuous as "BETTE".) One woman, who’d had her "XSTACY" plate for 19 years got it yanked by state bureaucracy the last time she tried to renew it.
Sexual innuendi are also forbidden (any use of 69 is denied outright) as are obscenities and vulgarities. Drug and gang references are also banned. If you’ve cleared all these hurdles, you can submit your choice of plate. You also have your choice of no fewer than a staggering 44 different backgrounds. (That’s nothing compared to Virginia’s dizzying 200 choices.) The drawback to choosing almost any of these is that all except "Protect Lake Tahoe" and the standard-issue "Sunset" plate restrict you to as few as four characters. Most custom backgrounds hold five characters but only the 1982 throwback plate holds six.
Subgroups of specialized plates are reserved for veterans, professional firefighters, volunteer firefighters, and members of the Masonic order, the National Guard, and the Civil Air Patrol. State rules require an annual rate of 1,000 registrations or renewals of a specialty plate to keep it in circulation. One such casualty was the March of Dimes plate, which was teetering on the brink of retirement a year ago and now is no longer available.
The most popular background, "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas", is sported by 85,700 vehicles. The practical and second-most-popular one is the Lake Tahoe plate, of which 17,389 are in circulation. Running a close third is "United We Stand," a patriotic plate that has 16,768 subscribers. University of Nevada-Reno has far more adherents proclaiming the cause (8,676 plates) than does University of Nevada-Las Vegas (4,434 plates).
Nevada’s licensing system got a shakeup recently, as Las Vegas Review-Journal highway columnist Richard Velotta noticed when he saw a plate that deviated from the standard combination of three letters followed by three numbers, separated by a space. Why the change? The DMV had literally run out of number combinations, having worked its way through 12 million potential permutations. So, in addition to the old system that started at 111 AAA and worked its way upward, Nevada plates now begin from 11A 111 and ascend from there. And once they reach 99Z 999, they’ll flip over to 000 00A. Last summer, the DMV started adding a small silhouette of Nevada to separate the two groups of letters/numbers. The department also maintains a sort of online graveyard of discontinued license plate designs.
There’s a $5,000 upfront cost, payable to the DMV, to commission a new customized license-plate background. For instance, the Nevada Firearms Coalition is trying to raise money for a "Protect the Second Amendment" themed plate. To help increase awareness of the campaign and put some excitement into it, the NFC has posted four possible designs online and is asking supporters to vote for their favorite. As of late December, all were running pretty much evenly. Promised NFC President Don Turner, "You know I’ll be first in line at the DMV the day the winning design gets released." Another plate currently going through the approval process, "Values Life," would raise money for the anti-abortion Women’s Resource Medical Centers of Southern Nevada. So, if you’re a Nevadan with a cause, there’s probably a license plate for you.
As author Stefan Lonce told Las Vegas Weekly, "Everyone is trying to tell a story … Most people don’t have a platform, so they use the bumper of their car."
