My entire adult life, I’ve heard various people tell me that I need to score my tabs after putting them on “so no one can steal them”. I’ve known many people like myself that find this idea absurd, and don’t bother with scoring. How did this idea become mainstream advice?
In New Mexico registration stickers have your plate number on them. I guess if they are removed it would fool someone giving a cursory glance at them. I am fairly certain the stickers are perforated so that peeling them off renders them unusable.
It is not uncommon to see drivers in Albuquerque without any plate at all.
I once saw a cardboard plate that said “plate stolen, cops didn’t do shit”
What are vehicle tabs?
You may be more familiar with a tax disc, or registration sticker or a tag. The little foil sticker you put in your car to show you’ve paid your taxes in connection to your car.
Ah, I know what you mean, we haven’t had those for 15 years here in Sweden…
We have similar tabs in Germany to indicate that the vehicle registration plate is valid, the car is insured and the tax is payed. However, they are manufactured in a way that makes it impossible to remove them in one piece.
If you don’t pay you vehicle tax or, even worse, don’t pay your insurance, some official will search for your car and scrape the tabs off.In Sweden, you don’t need the tab to guarantee that the plate is valid, as the plates come directly from Trafikverket and have watermarks all over. However, for the other two reasons, tax and insurance, the system in Sweden relies basically on hopes and prayers. Even a former professor at my department at a Swedish university drove his car without insurance.
We got rid of those in Ontario. Now no one drives with insurance or licences and hit and runs are common. Actual insured drivers have to pay more for premiums.
Uhm… what are “vehicle tabs” ?
EDIT: Oh, tags. I guess it’s the anual sticker proving that your registration is up to date. Don’t have those here anymore. My previous car had the 2012 stickers still when I sold it last year.
I think they might mean the registration tags. But I’ve never heard of those being stolen or that you should score them to prevent theft.
I guess it would be theoretically possible with a razor blade or something. I remember the ones here in Norway being a PITA to take off, so it was usually easiest to place the new one over the old one.
Same in the US. My stack is nearly a mm thick. I imagin someone could steal them… but it would be faster to unscrew the whole plate and take it home to work on it
Or just cut off the corner with a pair of these bad boys
(Seriously, don’t steal people’s tags, that’s shitty and stupid)
Only 1 mm? That’s like two years
My dad taught me to score them. I find it strange, scoring them prevents the supposed thief from being able to get the tag off cleanly, so they wouldn’t want to apply it to their car because it’d look sketchy?
Unlike your totally normal and not at all now damaged and sketchy looking tags?
The ones we’ve gotten have always come pre cut, if you want to remove one without tearing uses a flat razor, you can even dig into the paint on the license plate, the company that makes them probably makes extra to do this step and is probably the only reason it’s still done.
TIL i have been blessed with pre-cut tabs my whole life. Ontario and BC had fancy stickers to make them hard to steal, I never understood why. Eventually we got rid of them.
Never heard of it either, in the UK we used to have something called a ‘tax disc’ that was displayed in the window of a car but you’d have to break in to get that.
I’ve never had them stolen myself.
In PA, when they used to still use them, they had little wedge shapes cut into them when you got them, so once you put them on, they couldn’t be removed intact.
Because they couldn’t be removed, you’d see tons of cars with the corner of the license plate cut off.
Pennsylvania finally stopped using the registration stickers a few years ago.
No point to the registration stickers anymore anyway. The license plate scanners already know everything about you.
I don’t get it why was the corner of the license plate cut off?
They would cut the corner of the plate where the sticker was. They’d cut it off, and then I guess they’d put it on their plate or something. I don’t know exactly how it worked, but they were doing it to steal the stickers.
Lmao that’s hilarious
I used to live in a bad place, people would steal anything and everything. I had to lock up everything, hide everything of value. Yes I cut up the registration sticker into 50 pieces to prevent theft. I have seen them stolen before.
Nope, never. That said, I don’t live in a place that uses tiny brightly coloured stickers on the outside of the vehicle to prove it’s taxed, so that might be a factor.
I assume even where these are used, the police could just check a database to see if the vehicle is taxed.
You forget cops are assholes.
They also know if you’re vehicle is insured, but they still hassle you about having your physical insurance card.
One time, I had my expired plates stolen off a car I owned. The plates expired many years ago, the car died and sat quite a few years before I was able to get rid of it. What is someone doing with expired plates? The car next to it had valid plates. How dumb are people???
What is someone doing with expired plates?
Decorate the inside of their barn with them!
Fix a rust hole in a shitburger car. Though street signs work better.
Tell the kids long stories all about the cool (or not) car they used to be on!
What is someone doing with expired plates?
Stick em on a crime car. That way, if someone writes down the Tag, any investigation will go nowhere since they are expired.
Or to the previous owner, since that information doesn’t just disappear after expiring.
When you do crime you need a different plate. Expired is dumb but at least its not registered to the criminal.
Add new fake stickers pretty easily. Details like that are often overlooked by cops unless they have a real reason to look further. Can get pretty far without plates, so just a cursory glance will pass.
Haha my Oma did this one year, as the sticker came off almost immediately, and the registry wouldn’t replace it for her
Real talk: the cops only look at the stickers if they want an excuse to pull you over.
For every thing else they run your plates- and usually before they even do that much. If your registration is current, then, they may just be letting you know they got ripped off, or checking if your drunk or just incredibly bored.
That said… if someone goes to the trouble of peeling off a sticker, it’s not going to do all that much good, and probably catch them more charges than just being unregistered.
(More likely they’d steal the entire plates. Particularly one from a similar car to yours- color, make, model, year, etc.)
I got pulled over by a cop for “expired tabs” because I was out of state and my husband had not put them on my car while I was gone and I didn’t realize. The cop walks up loudly states YOURE BEING RECORDED, points to his camera and tells me my tags are expired and he wanted my info. I had my license but not insurance on me so I had to call my spouse who’s like “can’t the cop just look it up?” The cop came up as my husband was talking over my car speakers and heard a man and was immediately deflated, hung his head, said he didn’t care and walked away like wtf??
Another poster mentioned that PA stopped requiring them a few years back (I think it was more than a few), but shortly after they stopped requiring them a NY cop pulled me over and said that was the reason. I thought that was pretty unlikely since NY cops wouldn’t waste their time on minor out of state bureaucratic issues. When I told him that they weren’t required he seemed skeptical but went back to his car. After a while he came back a said I could go.
Yup. The only reason places still use them is to give yet another pretext for stopping people.
Same, for example, the little dinky plate lamp being out, or failing to signal for the proper distance (a few hundred feet, usually.)
Cops don’t care if your car’s registration is up to date. They use it as an excuse to get to more juicy charges.
I almost got my car towed because I left for work at 8am in a spot that had no parking after 7am with tabs that were over a year due. The only reason I didn’t get towed was because I got to the car while the meter maid was still entering info before the truck took it. It was already there and just waiting for authorization
You were almost certainly getting towed regardless of your registration status. It takes maybe five minutes to slap a parking ticket on a car. Typical response time for towing is typically north of 30 minutes unless there’s some type of “it’s dangerous” involved.
That truck was there when they started their round. Probably because they were having problems with people overstaying. (Or they’re dicks.)
Apparently tabs are tags.
Alberta got rid of them eight years ago or so, but before that they were extremely one-use items. Super-fragile with an incredibly strong glue. You could NOT have remove them with a razor blade and the precision of a master jeweller.
Besides, annual registration is what - 80 bucks? Not worth it.
See, that’s exactly where my confusion comes from too! The adhesive on those things are incredible. I’m afraid to fuck up when I put them on, because there’s no fixing it
Well first I’m hearing of this advice to score them. I have had someone attempt to steal them corner peeled up cleanly but didn’t manage to get it all the way off…
I had my plates stolen several years ago, if that counts!
I think it’s largely dependant on location. I live in the northeast US and never heard of this before my cousin moved to California and has his registration sticker stolen the day after he got Cali plates.
I have.
Interesting. When did it happen?
Ummm. The summer of 1994? I went into a head shop to chat and buy rolling papers. When I came out, someone had used tin-snips to remove the entire corner of the plate.
That’s wild
If you can, put the tag in the center of the plate. A border accessory is also a good deterrent.
A few quick slices? No biggie
Family member had it happen. It’s easy to take them off if there are 5 years of stickers on top of each other. But, just exacto knife the tag a lil and it’s too much trouble to lift off.
My dad did once. Stolen off his pickup while on a work parking lot
