So I just got this new old car. And the DMV gave me some new old license plates
to put on. And look, they start with the number 9. That means California's running out of license
plates, right? I gotta tell people. The end is near! The end of the current sequence of license
plates is near! Nobody seems to care, so let's amp up the
stakes a little bit. Wake up people! Don't you realize what 9 9 9 upside down is?! The "Mark of the Recycled Joke." What do you mean? We did this bit on the Arby's median video. I don't care. I think it's funny. The end is near! Then somebody wrote up on a bicycle who didn't
think it was funny at all. (on-screen captions) Okay, yeah, I'll go ahead and pack up. Thank you. Well, that was interesting. Turns out a city famous for protests has a
lot of rules for dealing with protests. No person shall conduct or participate in
expressive activity on district property. Deciding I'm not as funny as I think I am. I jumped in the new old car and took my question
somewhere more appropriate. This here is the headquarters for California's
DMV. Little boring looking. Not sure what I was expecting. But hey, what do you expect from the state
that gave you that as a license plate? For over 40 years, Californians had this 7-digit
sequence of numbers and letters that I have so many combinations, it seemed like it would
last forever. But now, it's nearly over. So what happens when the plates run out? That's a good question. I wanted to find out what could happen. I reached out to the DMV headquarters here
twice. And here's what they didn't tell me. (show open) Mark: "He would be gone for three or four
months and collecting all these signs and gas pumps and stuff." Mark Mendenhall takes a little after his dad. Mark: "And he'd come back and he'd have four
flat tires in the back of the trailer. He looked like 'The Grapes of Wrath.' But he'd come back in here, and I'd be unloading
all these gas pumps and all these signs and I'm going, 'Dad, what we're going to do with
all this stuff?'" This Mendenhall's Museum of Gasoline pumps
and Petroliana. Mark: "So, between my dad and I, there's like
90 years of collecting." In the 1950s, Jack Mendenhall opened and operated
a Richfield gas station. Mark: "The product changed the ARCO." Along highway 101 and Buelleton, California. Mark: "We grew up as a mechanic, worked on
cars. So gas and oil has kind of been our blood." The more his dad traveled the country on business
through the 1960-70s, the bigger the sign collection grew. And Mark caught the bug. Mark: "Collecting is a hobby that becomes
an obsession." It's a sort of museum that had Jay Leno gotten
into gas pumps instead of cars. It would look something a bit like this. Mark: "I'm still collecting. We have like 2,500 signs. I have over a hundred gas pumps. I have like 1,500 license plates." And that is why I'm here today. So, here in Mark's collection, you can see
how license plates evolved over the last century. California's first official license plate
started in 1914. Cars were originally a toy for rich people
to show off around town, but once Henry Ford and other manufacturers started to really
churn out a lot of cars, states started to realize, yeah, maybe we need some kind of
a registration plate to keep track of all of these things. California's first license plates were made
out of porcelain. Not cheap, but durable. Mark: "Porcelain is like an enamel that's
baked on like 1600 degrees. It never loses its luster. It can be out in the sun forever. And they don't fade." But even more people were buying cars, so
to save money... You'd keep the same porcelain plate year to
year, but you'd put on a registration sticker except these are not registration stickers. Fun shapes like a bear or a bell. Mark: "Only they were metal. And they had the registration number of your
registration on that." I'm not sure why they stopped doing this. All I can imagine, it's a cost thing because
the visibility on these porcelain plates is just gorgeous. I mean, being able to see that, it's very
legible. It was here in 1920 that they switched from
the porcelain plates. You can see that porcelain holds up over time
a whole lot better than the paint. But drivers once again got a new plate each
year. And the shape and size of the license plate
seemed to change a lot. Then you get to the World War II years where
metal suddenly is really important. They need it for the war. Mark: "They were using all the metal for munitions. So they would give you a little sticker to
put in your windshield supposed to a plate." But by 1945 when a war ended, and as Californians
treated themselves to a new car after years of not being able to buy one, the state saved
even more money. Mark: "They used the same plate again and
they put these metal stickers on there." Validation tabs. Mark: "[19]51 and then they did a '52, '53,
'54, and '55." Except this time they didn't have cool shapes. The Automotive Manufacturing Association was
tired of not being able to plan a bumper out for their car. If somebody bought the car in Utah, the plate
looks like that, but Nevada like that. In Arizona like that in Oklahoma like that. Nebraska like that. A Tennessee license plate, shaped like the
state of Tennessee. By the end of 1955, all 48 states and the
District of Columbia agreed on a standard shape. 12 inches by 6 inches all the time. California let drivers use their 1956 plate
over and over again, and they'd just shove a new registration sticker off to the side. Using the combination letter letter letter,
number number number. By 1963, the state made everybody turn their
plates in. And exchange them for new ones. With the colors reversed and a dedicated spot
to put that registration sticker. Which ran for 6 years until the license plate
combinations ran out. Then in 1969, the state changed out the black
background for a blue background. The DMV flipped the numbers and the letters
started the series all over again. Radio DJ: "It's 6:15. Good morning. This is Charlie Tuna." Radio jingle: "93 K-H-J!" But at the rate Californian bought cars, this
pattern would only last ten years. Tops. In 1972, Governor Ronald Reagan signed a law
that allowed drivers to pay a little extra fee. The money going to help with environmental
projects throughout California. In turn, the state will let them put nearly
anything they wanted to on their license plate. So, if you wanted your plate to say "FAT BOY,"
it could say "fat boy." Well, pretty much anything within reason. California's DMV have spent 5 decades censoring
out license plates that are in bad taste. But evidently, they're fans of Elvis Presley...
or attractive looking elves. Even with help from vanity plates, the blue
series ran out of combinations by 1980. So the DMV flipped the numbers and letters
again. Only this time, they added a prefix. Now the plate series could last ten times
longer. Each time the combination ran out, they just
jumped that prefix to the next number. And they'd run it again. The blue plate can live forever. Well, thankfully, it didn't have to. California license plates are notoriously
plain. So in 1980, when this came out, well people
said, "Oh good, finally. Some art." Not often a license plate gets a glowing review
in the newspaper. The state senator representing Concord, California
pushed through the art deco plate with a modernist "California" at the top, the golden sun rising
over the mountains for the ocean. And down at the bottom, "The Golden State." Personally, this is my favorite here. I don't know if it's because of the show,
"LA Law," where they slammed the trunk, or its role in a film bigger than "Star Wars." It's too bad. Point didn't even survive more than about
5 years. Road videos with no YouTube ads! Contribute any about. Then sign in with your Patreon account at
RoadGuyRob.com! California finally had a good-looking license
plate. But then the DMV stripped any semblance of
style, taking us all the way back to the pragmatism of the old black and blue plates, except these
were white. Look at how happy the DMV director is announcing
the "Golden State" plate. And how she's *trying to look happy about
the new boring license plate. As for why they're going away, her office
blames you and me. Apparently we like to "garbage up" the license
plate. Their quote, not mine. "The Golden State" phrase is totally gone. The "California" at the top is half covered
up. What's the point in having art if you can't
see the art? Also, dumping the decorations would save California
half-a-million dollars per year. A savings of over four cents for a license
plate. Thankfully, in 1994, the state at least changed
out the font at the top of the plate. This is going to be almost impossible to demonstrate
on camera in the middle of the daytime, but bear with me. These older plates didn't really reflect at
all. That's why they used the bright color like
yellow; so hopefully you had a chance of seeing and being able to read the plate at night. By the time they got to the later blue plates,
they put a ground-up bead in the paint that would reflect a little bit. So there was some reflectivity. But when these "Golden State" plates came
out, they used a film from the 3M company. And it started to reflect really well. They call that retro-reflectivity. It's the same coating they put on road signs
and makes it easy to see at night. Your headlights help carry the color backwards. But it was this series down here where the
retro-reflectivity started to get really good. The standard retro-reflectivity now makes
it easier to read the plate numbers and letters. And it acts like an emergency reflector. One more shiny thing to see on a stalled car
in the dark. All of California's license plates come from
one place and it's right down this road here, Folsom prison. You know, the place Johnny Cash sang about. (Grammy-award winning remix) But 25 years before Johnny's famous song,
inmates were already stamping license plates out of steel starting in 1947. And then the state later changed to aluminum. And they used tons of aluminum here, and on
top of that, retro reflective sheeting. And on any given year, inmates will use a
roll of this proceeding that's 5 miles long. And I'm lying to you, they go through that
5 mile long roll, not once a year... ...but once a day! It's a bit humbling to truly process, just
how many other people we have to share this state with. Made manifest by the millions of motor vehicles
everywhere. Every workday, DMV employees throughout California
hand out about 15,000 license plates. That's assigning 7,500 new sequences because
California has a front and a rear license plate that they require, right? And according to the nerds, at LicensePlates.CC That current run of the current series here
is currently right here. Visitors to the website report the most recent
high number-and-letter license plate they've seen so far. And I wonder how many more months or years
do we have before we finally roll all the way up to 9 ZZZ999? Thanks to Internet Archive, we can plot 18
years of these nerdy number reports. Then draw a projection line along those points
and it takes us right up to the ceiling. The end of the 9 series happening just before
2027. Surely the biggest state in the country has
a plan, right? So, I reached out to DMV headquarters twice. And both times they didn't respond to me because
when I said, "Hi, I'm media. I've got a small YouTube channel and I'm not
technically a TV station or a newspaper. But I have a media inquiry." They chose to ignore me. A day. I feel like Rodney Dangerfield. Can't get no respect. But thankfully, there is somebody who works
for real media who got kind of an answer. Amy Bentley, a correspondent for the Riverside
Press Enterprise (newspaper), did get a DMV spokesperson to say. (captioning on-screen) I'll post a link to Amy's full article down
in the description. So we don't know what the DMV is planning
to do because unfortunately, it sounds like they might not know what they're going to
do yet. One possible solution comes from Hollywood. Eight years ago, we should have been switching
to this 9-digit barcode license plate from "Back to the Future II." Which has nearly 1 billion car combinations. Of course, it's a little bit drab looking,
but don't worry. I can freedomize it. (From sea to shining sea!) California is prototyping this digital license
plate. But you have to pay the third-party company
that makes it over $200 a year. And as for now, the plate is either vanity
or still uses the same number and letter scheme that we're running out of. But if history serves any indication, there's
a good chance they do what they've done twice before... and flip it. Maybe we'll have letter, number number number,
letter letter letter. Or they might just reverse the current pattern. A question like this comes across as a bit
silly, but license plates are everywhere. They're a big part of the landscape, even
if they're just kind of in the background or we don't pay that much attention to it. A big thank you to Mark Mendenhall for sharing
his license plate collection with us. If you'd like to see it in person, he'll be
glad to take you through. He charges a small fee and the tour is by
appointment only. I'll post details in the description below. If you have a transportation-related question
that's been bugging you the way this question has been bugging me, feel free to reach out
to me. The best way is to become a patron of Patreon.com/RoadGuyRob,
where regular people like you, kick in a few bucks each month. So, I can spend some time and actually dig
in and have a substantive video with some substance to it rather than something stupid
that the YouTube algorithm. What's up, algorithm? Get some sweet gas Chevron. Don't forget to buy my merch. All right. Three hours. As fun as that would be for both of us, right? Thanks for watching. I'll see you later.
