I got curious, voting in the license plate bracket today, about how many license plates are out there. Not designs. Plates.
I googled it—‘how many registered vehicles in the United States’—and I don’t know how accurate the numbers were, but they all came in higher than I would have guessed. Take this example from Statista: They estimate there to be more than 250 million registered vehicles in a nation of fewer than 350 million people.
Since they’re pulling this from vehicle registration databases, one would guess that they miss some cars that have been put out to pasture, and I suppose it’s possible some individuals really drive the total up by having a lot of cars themselves, but still. That’s a lot of license plates! Especially since so many states require them on both the front and the back.
