Check your license plates

Man, this car-theft industry has no limits! They swap your plates with plates from stolen car plates, and the rest is misery. Seems like we need padlocks on the plates too! :banghead3:

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/edmonton/story/2009/01/04/edm-licence-plate-theft.html

 

Not to be outdone they are cutting off catalytic converters here in the US. The recyclers give a good amount for them because they contain palaydium and platinum.

 

This is nuts! :banghead3:

In the early 90's, when I attended NMSU in Las Cruces, NM, we had a HUGE problem with our plates being stolen. It was discovered that people would steal them and take them to Juarez, MX, (about 40 miles down the road) and put them on their cars in order to help when crossing the border into El Paso, TX. I don't think that MX had the windshield stickers with the registered license plate on it at that time, so the car's registration was determined by its license plate.

About 13 years ago, when my wife and I lived in Albuquerque, she had her tags stolen off of her license plate (NM only has one plate on the back). It was easy for the thief because she would put the new tag over the old one, so after a few years, it was easy to peel the mass of stickers off the plate. Nowadays, I will scrape the old tag off and put the new tag on when we renew our registration. It also helps that in OR, we only renew our registration every other year, so there's not as many tags to remove.

Here in OR, we have two plates...I'm not sure if that helps at all, since to have a matching pair, one would need to replace the front and the back...but I haven't heard of too many problems around here though. I have seen a few cars with the tags cut out of the plates, however.

 

Here too. One dealership of some rice-rocket that has them right at the back, was shocked to find all their cars cleaned off in the morning. Expensive puppies too.

 

I like the Mexican solution. My car had that, when I lived there in Guadalajara. Here we use the tag system like your wife's case. But I'll look around for special fasteners. We keep our plates forever, here.

We've got a subsidized Immobilizer program so car thefts in this Province are down by 36% from last year, but the Wild West of OilBerta is 4 times the population with all kinds of gangs and organized crime. Too much easy money.

 

Meanwhile, my city's car and property thefts are down by 36%!

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/manitoba/story/2009/01/06/crime-stats.html

 

lol i stack the stickers but theve never gotten stole...however before my parents gave me the wagon,someone did steal the whole plates! i have 2 plates and they stole both! took 'em 5 miles up the road stole a convertibal from a no name dealership and took it joy riding. they found the car in a ditch close to 20 miles away with a clear cut through the woods and a pretty horrific scene there...

 

Why do people have to be so dumb? Really. I mean, can't you just work for what you have like everyone else does!? I never worry about the tags piling up, because I have more license plates than tags it seems. I've never owned a car for even a year. I turn 'em over real quick usually.

 

Unfortunately, those people heard that work is a four-letter word.

 

Ha! I tell ya, you're pretty much right. There's nothing wrong with workin hard for what you got. I've earned everything I have by going to work. Nothing wrong with it, and as all our fathers have said 'it builds charachter'.

 

Never had any problems like that here, I just pay the winos a few bucks protection money and they guard my truck like pit bulls when I work downtown. The worse that happens in my neighborhood is kids stealing stuff out of parked cars in driveways and beer from fridges in garages. Why in the police reports do people always happen to leave their laptops sitting on the seat in an unlocked car? I think it's an easy way to get a new laptop, used to be Nikon cameras.
I had year of manufacture plates on the Vista Cruiser but took them off. The 1971 Ohio plates I had on it were yellow. The Ohio "party plates" those convicted of DUI's have to use on their cars to go to work and back home are the same yellow as the old '71 plates and attract the cops like flies from a mile away.

 

"Party Plates" I've seen this on some license plate collectors' websites...but never heard them called that... that's a good one!

It's too bad when you want to use more authentic plates, but you can't. Our problem in Oregon is that every plate that has ever been used is still valid, but only if they are still on the car and the registration has been kept up. In 1987, Oregon went to the "tree" plate (first the "dead tree" plate with the yellow "smog sky", then the next year, they went to the more appealing "live tree" plate with the blue sky). Those "tree" plates are still in use today. All of the older cars that still have the Blue-on-Yellow and Yellow-on-Blue plates are ok, but the second you take them off and put on different plates (e.g. special interest plates, etc)...or if the registration lapses, they are no longer valid and can never be put back on the car. If you want to have special plates made to look authentic based on the year of the car, you can pay for that, but then your car is only able to be driven in parades and to/from a car show...you can't use those special plates on your daily driver.

 

I wish I could still have old-school plates on my vehicles. I have 1958 plates for my 58 Chevy, can't use them. Had a 31 Model A, have the 31 plates, couldn't use them. If you want to put them on, they should have a way to register them. I'd pay extra, and that's all the gov't usually cares about.

 

In Wisconsin you could of used them if you had antique plates on the Model A, have to be 1945 or earlier to use the year of manufacture plates there.
I would just put them on and to h*ll with the cops, they probably don't even know you can't. I do keep the hysterical plates in the car like your supposed to, my YOM plates aren't even registered. Most of the cops have bikes and cars around here too, the only time I get pulled over is when the cop wants to check out my car. The last one spent about 5 minutes chasing me down some hilly and winding country roads. He told me, "I was bottoming out and laying on the sway bars around the curves" and then the " How fast do you think you were going?" question, I told him I was doing the speed limit of course.
I ended up at his house that evening to check out his kid's GTO project and to have a few adult beverages.

 

Smooth-talker! Did you ever tell him how fast?