DMV can’t replace everyone’s old aluminum license plates. What if they were plastic?

Four years ago, lawmakers decided that too many North Carolina license plates were getting shabby and hard to read and decided that all plates should be turned in and replaced every seven years.

The replacement effort began Jan. 1, 2021, then abruptly stopped four months later. The state Division of Motor Vehicles said Corrections Enterprises, which makes the plates at the N.C. Correctional Institution for Women in Raleigh, didn’t have enough aluminum to keep up with demand, and the program was suspended.

Now the DMV would like lawmakers to do away with the replacement mandate altogether. Aluminum remains in short supply, says DMV spokesman Marty Homan, but the agency also believes that replacing plates every seven years is unnecessary.

“The plates can last longer than 7 years,” Homan said.

If a plate becomes damaged or faded, Homan added, the vehicle owner can request a new one at no charge. (There is a $21.50 replacement fee if the plate has been lost or stolen.)

The seven-year time limit for license plates appeared as a single sentence in a bill passed by the General Assembly and signed into law by Gov. Roy Cooper in 2019. Now a bill passed by the House on Tuesday would simply remove that sentence from state law.

House Bill 199 would also direct the DMV, in consultation with the corrections department, to study the potential use of something other than aluminum for license plates. The two agencies would report their findings to the General Assembly by Jan. 1, 2024.

The DMV is asking for the study because of the continued difficulty with the supply of aluminum.

Aluminum has several advantages

Moving away from aluminum would make North Carolina unique. All 50 states and the District of Columbia make their license plates out of aluminum, because it’s light, durable and doesn’t rust, says Jose Rodriguez, who owns a company in Texas that designs and produces plates for federally recognized Indian tribes.

States once made license plates out of steel, back when car owners got a new tag every year. But with the advent of reflective license plate stickers that let states update the expiration date without issuing a new plate, states began switching to longer-lasting aluminum, Rodriguez said.

“Aluminum has several advantages to steel that makes it significantly more cost effective,” Rodriguez wrote in an email. “The primary being that aluminum doesn’t rust.”

But supply chain and other issues have tightened aluminum supplies since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Several states, including Montana and Arizona, have had to temporarily slow or halt production of new plates when they ran low on aluminum.

In North Carolina, the DMV usually issues 400 to 500 new license plates a day. But when the agency began replacing older ones in 2021, it was sending out 10 times that many, depleting its supply of aluminum. The DMV suspended the replacement effort indefinitely on May 3, 2021.

It’s not clear what alternatives North Carolina would consider. Rodriguez said he’s aware of only one state that has tried a non-metal license plate since World War II; Rhode Island experimented with plastic dealer plates in the late 1970s but didn’t put them into production.

Overseas, though, plastic plates are more common. In Great Britain, Rodriguez said, nearly all plates are printed on vinyl and then covered with clear acrylic.

“It has been that way since the 1980s,” he wrote. “Plates there are privately made by licensed plate makers, and that was the cheapest, fastest and easiest method of producing plates.”