I’ve always found vanity license plates fascinating and love to try to figure out the more obscure ones. I always said I’d never pay for them, but once I started making instruments, I couldn’t resist getting
WH1STLES
Anyone have ones they’d care to share, with explanations if they’re not self evident?
My Mom is fascinated by vanity license plates too and often spends long portions of car trips trying to figure out what a plate means until we finally can’t take it anymore and tell her that’s not a vanity plate.
I am completely into anonymity and if I was required by law to get a vanity license plate, I would just keep my current plate. Unless of course, a random number made my car more conspicious. In that case, I’d have to come up with a most forgetable license plate. I’m a mess.
I find them interesting and entertaining. Have never had, nor do I especially want one. However, since the current Maryland format is a 3 letter or number combo followed by another, I do try to think of some relevance for my plate. 3BR C86, for example is a 3 bedroom house built circa '86.
I’d never pay for vanity plates, but I did pay to conserve nature with a piping plover plate, and the 3 letters on it are PAX - something I would put on a vanity plate if I had one. And I guess my five bumper stickers remove all possibility of anonymity, especially “Well-behaved women seldom make history” which my daughter gave me, and my Obama 2008 and Obama 2012, which kind of stand out here in Canada.
The best one I ever saw was:
IML8IML8
Care to guess the make,model, and color?
some of 'em are too easy 
They don’t make them anymore, do they? My brother rolled a red one once and came out okay.
I have a photo in front of me that I took in the music shops district of Istanbul in 2008. It’s a black car with licence plate 34 UD 7442. Presumably an ud player, but the parking technique is pure banjo - one front wheel two steps up on the pavement with rest of the car canted at a 30 degree vertical angle and 45 degrees across the road.
I also love vanity plates, though I don’t have one myself.
My aunt once had a minivan with UME&BB=3
A friend of mine is the only MUSCTCHR in the state.
Just out in the parking lot at work is a BMW with CUATSOCR,
an Audi A4 with A8NEXT, a Mini Cooper with YEHAAA!
and a Nissan Leaf that I haven’t figured out yet: BTRYNCLD
The Raleigh/Durham area is crawling with Linux adherents
(e.g., Red Hat was founded at NCSU). In Linux filesystems,
you can find your devices in the /dev directory. For example,
your first hard disk is at /dev/hd0. This has played out on
license plates around these parts, by now probably in all
its permutations: /DEV/CAR, /DEV/MOM, /DEV/TAXI…
I love it, but I bet someone at the DMV is very confused.
I’ve also seen a few variants on 31337 and 1337HXXR, but
if you have to say it, you probably aren’t one.
Realtors have probably run out of options, because I’ve seen
ISELL4U
SELLSHMS
LTMESELL
ICNGETU$$
BUYW/ME
NC cities have a lot of imports from other states, prompting
various versions of:
NYMINC
CAALNC
FLGANC
It took me awhile to stop trying to expand the letters into
sounds like you usually do and break them into states.
This is my favorite license plate story, though:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/08/ilvtofu-license-plate-req_n_184856.html
Battery Not Included …
Except it’s “battery included” because it’s an electric car.
Now I get it. Thank you so much.
At a local bar there’s a collection of old plates on the wall. Here are a couple in the vanity category:
TE DEUM (Overheard: “Why ‘tedium’?” True story.)
IWANATV (Cali plate, how utterly sublime is that? But the former owner’s brother swears, with chagrin, that she meant it to be read “Iowa Native”.)
Right, of course! I was puzzling … Maybe you get a dealer discount without the batteries. Then just drop by your local Apple store and pick up a thousand MacBook batteries.
Hm. A coworker once reported seeing this one: KYLADY
Because, I hope, the lady in question was from Kentucky
and not a connoisseur of fine lubricants.
A slippery one, to be sure.
A friend of mine has ILNPIPR.
I get the square root of -1 (i), natural logarithm (ln), and pi … but I’m just not sure about the “pr”. 
My Chesapeake Bay plate was Qajaq. When I discovered the state wasn’t really using the extra bucks from the Bay plate for Bay preservation as they said they would I sunk it. I rarely saw the light of recognition in my rear view at a stop light although everybody laughed at the “Dole is 96” bumper sticker.
Public Relations for Imaginary Natural Logarithm pi
you’se should be able to get fruit instead…
In the UK there is or was a woman, I think her name was Fiona MacKenzie, who used to work for the Magazine Penthouse.
Her car had the numberplate PEN fifteen.