Pet Peeves - Custom Licence Plates

Still feeling curmudgeonly and peevish? I am. Despite being Australian—we're supposed to be the most laid-back people on the planet—there's a lot out there in the world that grabs my goat. That goat can be kind of gruff and angry sometimes.

On the chopping block this time around are custom licence plates. I hate them for a number of reasons. Firstly, they're a crap form of expression. You're constrained to a set of seven characters, of which most combinations have already been snagged, so you're going to have to fight the laws of the English language pretty freakin' hard to come up with something vaguely original. Most of those "original" end products are so bastardised as to bear little resemblance to the word or concept they were initially supposed to represent. I'd kill to have a good example at my fingertips right now, but I don't.

What I do have is this, and it brings me to my second point.

It would seem he or she—let's be real, it's a "he" isn't it?—has his 450 HP, and I don't think he's referring to a Hewlett Packard computer. It couldn't be made any more obvious unless the plate was bordered in pink neon, and that's been known to happen.

What we're asked to assume here is that the car is capable of spewing forth around 450 horse power. That's a lot of horses. He's evidently very proud of it, and why wouldn't he be? He's probably blown untold sums of money jamming an air-forced filter here and a muffler expansion there just to extract a handful of extra horsies out of the motor. And he wants you to know it too. As he hits the 280 during rush hour and starts dropping the foot on the pedal as he weaves through the banks of traffic, he wants you to look on in in amazement as he streaks past in a blaze of red. He wants you to clock the licence plate as it disappears into the vanishing point and think, Jebus, those were a whole lotta horses that just flew past and it seems like that red Supra is the car that's got 'em—all 450 of them. The licence plate tells me so.

This is the part that disturbs me the most. When did our cars become such an extension of our personalities that we feel obligated to customise what is perhaps the least customisable part of the car in order to advertise to the world at large an inconsequential aspect of our lives? Nobody but the driver cares how many horses are in that car. Nobody else is impressed. You forked over $100 extra or whatever to the DMV so that you could engage in perhaps the lowest form of self expression. The money would have been better used had it been donated to charity.

Coming up soon: Mini Cooper drivers and the vehicular extension of personality.