The End of the License Plate Saga...

If you have been reading about and following my posts on the Trans Am, you know that one of the things that I really wanted to do was to get a of "original" year license plates. This would allow me to license the Trans Am as a collector vehicle and no longer pay for registration tax every year. Plus I would be able to have a unique looking license plate instead of the generic "Collector" one. Over the past few months, I have collected a small collection of license plates, which can be seen HERE and HERE.

Since I finally had a couple sets of plate that are in very good condition, I e-mailed the City of Bloomington Motor Vehicle Office. Since the city runs the motor vehicle office, I have got to know the manager that works there and she has been very helpful to me in the past. She got back to me and had real bad news for me. It turns out, she was just in a meeting the day before with representatives from the state regarding license plate issues, specifically original issue (collector) plates. It turns out, since the State of Minnesota likes to have specialty issue license plates (Critical Habitat, College, Support the Troops, ect) they have started to run out of license plate sequences to allow each plate to have unique numbers and letters. So, to solve this problem, they are "taking over" all license plate sequences back to 1968! They are allowing people that currently have "original" style license plate to keep the ones they have, but they will no longer be approving new applications. So since in Minnesota a collector car has to be at least 20 model years old, if you own a vehicle that is a 1968 to a 1989, you will NEVER be able to get "original" style Minnesota collectors plates.

So, with this recent discovery, my options on what license plates to put on the Trans Am, have become very simple:

To be honest, I am a little disappointed, but what can you do. I am going to hang onto the license plates that I have collected over the past few months just in case. The manager from the motor vehicle office said that the state has been getting a lot of complaints about this, not only from the residents but also from the DMV staff (it turns out another motor vehicle office manager is restoring a 1969 Ford Mustang, and was going to put original issue plates on it, but hadn't yet, and now he can't!).

Sometimes, I really wish license plates would go back to the way they used to be.....each state was assigned two colors, one for the background, and one for the letters, each plate stated the name of the state, the license plate number, and the state motto, or if it was a specialty plate or not (Farm Use, Collector, Apportioned, ect), and that was it. I guess being in law enforcement and have to read license plates all day long, has really made the new, fancy, pretty looking, NON-EMBOSSED, license plates a real pain. Oh well!