MiamiDade License Plates

[heydade]

the real reason has to do with the tourist murders we had back in the late 80's early 90's. Back then, would be car jackers/thieves would scope out parking lots at highway rest area's looking for lost and out of town tourists. They were easily identifiable by their license plate's. I think they just aimed at standarizing all the plates and making them look uniform and universal in their design. It's also cheaper to make a run of 500K plates with the same design as opposed to making smaller batches for each county.

[Keeper]

you r right heydade. If I recall correctly, it had to do with a woman tourist driving a rental car that had another county name on it. They took a wrong turn and ended up in a bad area, where at least 1 was killed. Several other tourist were shot at or carjacked or robbed. They then started the no county name tag

It use to be you could select to have the county, but I think they finally did away with that too.

[Desdemona25]

Originally Posted by Keeper

you r right heydade. If I recall correctly, it had to do with a woman tourist driving a rental car that had another county name on it. They took a wrong turn and ended up in a bad area, where at least 1 was killed. Several other tourist were shot at or carjacked or robbed. They then started the no county name tag

It use to be you could select to have the county, but I think they finally did away with that too.

Apparently the rental cars could be identified by the agency's name on the front (reason why they no longer do that) and then the license plate number on the back usually started with a Y. After several murders of foreign tourists that were highly publicized, the practice was stopped.

You might still be able to get something that says the county, but I'm not sure. It's been a long while since I've had something that lists the county on my tag (specialty tag for 4 years and then my recent vehicle purchase automatically gave me a Sunshine State plate).

[Wbonvb]

DADE was eliminated from your tag due to constant robbery of tourists in the late 80s and early 90s as well as using certain letters for rental car tags robbers saw a tag beginning with a certain letter and an idiot with a map on the dash and a robbery occured. It was also eliminated to keep police harrasment down when you left "dade county " several FL sherriff depts were know for profiling and targeting cars with dade tags with no prevocation

[Travelassie]

Originally Posted by heydade

the real reason has to do with the tourist murders we had back in the late 80's early 90's. Back then, would be car jackers/thieves would scope out parking lots at highway rest area's looking for lost and out of town tourists. They were easily identifiable by their license plate's. I think they just aimed at standarizing all the plates and making them look uniform and universal in their design. It's also cheaper to make a run of 500K plates with the same design as opposed to making smaller batches for each county.

Those targeted tourists usually rented cars, and many of the car rental agencies had their cars registered, for some reason, in Manatee County. So a car with a Manatee County label on it's license tag was assumed to be a rental car, and the occupants became targets. After that, they decided to eliminate the county label on all Florida license plates. I see there are still a few cars around that have license plates labeled with the county.

[tallrick]

All my vehicles had "collectible" or "antique" except for my trailers so I never really had to deal with the county name.

[MadManofBethesda]

Originally Posted by Wbonvb

DADE was eliminated from your tag due to constant robbery of tourists in the late 80s and early 90s as well as using certain letters for rental car tags robbers saw a tag beginning with a certain letter and an idiot with a map on the dash and a robbery occured.

As Wbonvb wrote above, the issue with tourists in rental cars had to do with all rental license plates beginning with 1E. The 1 was for Dade County (the largest in FL), and the E meant that that the car was registered as a rental.