VA is embossed. Front and rear are required.

quote:

Originally posted by PHPaul:
Front and rear in Maine. "Regular" plates are embossed.

I think the various designer plates (chickadee, cooked lobster, save the gay whales...) are as well, but I'm not sure about that.

Yup, only embossed plates up here. Even all the various specialty plates.

Oklahoma went to the flat printed plates a few years ago. I ran OCR or LPR "Optical Character Recognition" aka "License Plate Reader" cameras as part of my work. Interestingly the infrared camera does not "see" any of the artwork (Oklahoma has the state bird) on the plate. The plates are engineered so the infrared camera sees straight thru the artwork and all you see on infrared is white background and black letters and numbers.

I think most of this is setup this way as it is easier for the toll road equipment to get the information they need. I am sure automated Police applications are part of the reason also. It is just so easy to have a camera and computer scan and alert to what they are looking for.

I have Texas State Rifle Assn. plates (The $ go to shooting scholarships at Texas A&M & 4H) and they are printed, flatter than day old beer.

CA uses printed for temp plates or for new cars but then issues embossed permanent plates.

Printed. However, there is a new plate coming out that is definitely not embossed, but not simply printed either. Instead it is - or appears to be - a highly reflective paint (white characters on dark blue background). When my tags/plate come up in November I expect to get one of these. The formatting is also different. Instead of a three-digit number, space, then three letters, it is three digits, space, four letters. I suspect this reflectivity is to make it easier to scan my plate. Only one, the rear, is required.

Michigan has embossed plates with reflective overlays on them. As the plates are aluminum once water and salt gets under them they will corrode and the overlay will lift and peel.

Michigan requires us to replace our plates after ten years, license plate renewals at that time come with a notice new plate required.

The Texas tags used to be embossed steel, now they are printed aluminum.

Born and raised in NJ and they switched over to the printed ones a few years ago. I have both standard issued tags and vanity and they are all printed now.

I would think cost and ease of producing them plus the high tech inks should make them last damn near forever.

-Jeff

New Mexico plates are stamped with paint and graphics. One plate issued for rear.

We have several choices here's the most common.



.

NE has the cheap printed thin aluminum plates. Front and rear plates issued and required. NE get new plates every 6 years.

On a side note our county ran out of license plates to issue. Ordering and shipping snafu supposedly. So people that got new cars are waiting to register.

Ours are embossed. The hope is to teach our Governors a useful skill so that when they are released they can have a somewhat useful skill and get a REAL job.

quote:

Originally posted by Xtbone97x:
Born and raised in NJ and they switched over to the printed ones a few years ago. I have both standard issued tags and vanity and they are all printed now.
-Jeff

Why are Jersey tags the color of pee?

I've never been able to figure that one out.

Ours in PA are (I guess?) a combination of the two traditional PA tag colors of yellow (older) and blue (more recent):

quote:

Originally posted by Lefty Sig:
Indiana has flat aluminum plates that get snagged and bent by carwash brushes. I bought a metal frame for mine to keep it flat.

Iowa too, we do have cool "blackout" plates though. For a recurring $10 road fund payment with renewal you get all black license plates you can go with random numbers or pay for vanity. They are a big hit here and I get asked questions about it when I am traveling out of state.

quote:

Originally posted by PASig:

It seems to me that over half of the cars on the road with PA tags have tags that look like shit; peeling, beat up, illegible, just looks like ass. Other states must enforce this better than us because it seems to be a PA thing to see a nice car with plates that look like they went through WWII.

When your PA plate gets bad enough, you can get a free replacement from PennDOT. You need to get a police officer or service station employee fill out a form and you just mail it in and will get a replacement plate. I just did this with my wife's car.

The worker at the service station said that there was a batch of faulty plates where the laminate peels off the plate over time but that the issue has been corrected in newer runs. My old NJ plates never peeled like that and I had them for over ten years.