Have you ever rented a car in Texas and the license plate is registered in Utah? Or Oklahoma? Or you rent a car in New York, and the plate is from Illinois?
So what’s up with that?
Frankly, I was always curious about it. I’d rent a car in one state, and the car’s license plates would be from somewhere else – always doomed to look like a tourist, LOL!
As it turns out, there are a few things at play:
One-way rentals
The easiest explanation is one-way rentals. Say you live in California and want to drive part of Route 66 for your vacation. But you only want to drive it in one direction, only up to Missouri, and then fly home. Once you get to Missouri, the rental company will have a car with (let’s say) California plates on it. It would cost a fortune to ship the car back to California, so they just start renting the car where it is. Eventually, it may make its way back to California. Or not.
The semi-annual rental car migration
This goes up there with one-way rentals. Things were obviously different during COVID, but for years, states such as Arizona and Florida have needed more cars during the winter months, since they are vacation and snowbird destinations while the rest of the country (and Canada) is freezing.
To get enough vehicles to those locations (and out of places where they’re not really needed in the winter), car rental companies have offered “deals” to bring bunches of them south in the fall and back north in the spring (the deals used to be AMAZING. They’re not so hot anymore). This “migration” would mean that cars from all different states would be in other states.
It’s cheaper to register a car in some states than in others
Based on the prices on this page (which are current as of March, 2023), you can get an idea of the prices for registration fees, license plate fees, title fees, etc. for passenger vehicles.
As an example, all of those for a new car cost $120 + $5 + $25 ($150 total) in Connecticut, but if it’s a sub-compact car, it would only cost $26 + $25+ $50 ($101) in New York. That’s only a $40 difference. But multiply that by 1000 cars and you’re talking about a savings of about $50,000 when buying new cars for your area’s dealerships. So…more cars are registered in, in this case, New York than Connecticut.
And now you know 🙂
Feature Photo: etags
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