Recently we had a lot of joking about the name of the license plate registration stickers and what they are called regionally, Decal, Sticker, Tab, Tag, etc…
Well, North Carolina has decided to not only do away with the license plate stickers, they are not going to be issuing physical registration cards either… And that all becomes effective on October 1st…
They say the NC police all have electronic systems that allow them to immediately verify a vehicle’s registration status in real time…
And the law does not require the vehicle owner to remove the old stickers after Oct 1st.
Well, what could go wrong with this?
I imagine that the first time a NC driver travels out of state and attracts the attention of the local police, they probably will be pulled over for questioning… Why do you have an “expired registration sticker” on your license plate, or better yet, “Why don’t you have any registration sticker on your license plate?”
Oh, the North Carolina DMV will let you print a PDF copy of your vehicle registration over the internet or they will sell you printed copy for an extra fee…
The DMV claims it will reduce opportunities for fraud and counterfeit registrations stickers…
I think they are only fooling themselves as most of those counterfeit registrations stickers were not fooling anyone. But now, with no registrations stickers displayed, the police would have to actually run the plate number to check the validity of the registration…
That will take all the fun out of it. Every year i remove the old before putting the new ones on, straight. You can tell a lot about a person by their stickers.
People have been known to steal registration decals. If the stolen decal is used only to satisfy a landlord, they did fool someone. Do you examine decals to see if it is on the correct license plate?
Local police have been doing that for 30 years. The color of the decal correlates with the year, but the month is difficult to read @ 70 mph and it is impossible to read the registration number on the decal without getting out of the car. Police check registration status of vehicles via the DMV database while driving. Can you imagine stolen vehicles being overlooked based on the registration decal?
There are license plate readers all over town to track the movement of stolen vehicles and stolen license plates but, are there any police available to investigate auto theft?