Photo © Stefan Lonce

He’s driving down the highway when another car pulls up beside him, windows rolled down. The occupants lean his way, to get a look at him. Then they start singing loudly: “Wimoweh, wimoweh, wimoweh, wimoweh.” Just miles down the road, another car pulls alongside and the scene repeats.

He’s Jay Siegel of the 1960s do-wop group, The Tokens, and his car is just one of the estimated 9.3 million registered vehicles in this country that have been “vanitized.” Siegel’s vanity license plate reads “WIMOWEH,” the choral refrain to his hit record, “ The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

This story, the estimate of the number of vanity plates, and the word “vanitized” itself are the work of Stefan Lonce, a Long Island, NY, newspaper editor and a vanity plate aficionado on a mission: to write a book on the phenomenon of vanity plates and the stories behind them.

“I always assumed people with vanity plates had more money than brains,” Lonce says. “And then it came to me... I’m a newspaper editor and I have a platform, but most people have the bumper of their car and that’s where they can tell a story.”

Lonce’s desire to write his book led him to do what no one had ever done: tally the number of vanity license plates in the US and Canada. Publishers, he knew, would expect him to provide data showing the potential market for the book. He called several state departments of motor vehicles and was surprised to learn they don’t have the number of vanity plates issued readily available. He called the American Association of Motor Vehicles (AAMVA), and no one there knew the answer either.

But an official from AAMVA soon called back with an offer: the AAMVA would canvas all of the DMVs in the US and the corresponding agencies in Canada if Lonce would compile the data.

That’s how we know 1 in 26.15 registered motor vehicles have vanity plates, which translates into nearly 9.3 million or 3.8% of the nearly 243 million registered motor vehicles in the US. And that’s where we get the term, “vanity plate penetration,” and are able to use it in this sentence: Virginia has the highest vanity plate penetration with 1 in 6.18 registered cars (or 16%) being vanitized.

After Virginia, the next five states with the highest vanity plate penetration are New Hampshire (1 in 7.15); Illinois (1 in 7.46); Nevada (1 in 7.86); Montana (1 in 10.2); and Maine (1 in 10.22). The state with the lowest percentage of vanity plates is Texas, with only .56%, or 1 in 178.3 registered cars.

Lonce believes the price of vanity plates, which range from the lowest at $10 per year in Virginia to the highest at $108.50 per year in Minnesota, influences the penetration rate but isn’t the only deciding factor. It doesn’t explain why Florida, which only charges $12 per year, ranks 32nd in vanity plate penetration with only 1 in 36.47 registered cars—or 2.7%—having vanity plates.

“I think in some areas they reach a tipping point, where everyone is doing it because everyone else is doing it,” Lonce explains.

The recession has also probably had an impact on the number of vanity plates, Lonce says. He says Ohio raised its fee from $10 to $35 per year and the number of vanity plates went down by 110,000. But, he points out, they increased their vanity plate revenue from $5 million to $14 million.

Putting all of this data together took about a year. But the numbers don’t tell the whole story and for Lonce, the stories behind the numbers are everything.

To get those stories, Lonce has had to do a lot of legwork. He doesn’t just want the plate’s message; he wants the story behind it. So he tries to find interesting plates where he can also strike up a conversation—mall parking lots, gas stations, etc.

Lonce says the more popular themes are pets and what he calls “soccer mom plates” that celebrate family life, such as “4MYBOYS.” Among the more clever genres of vanity plates are those readable in a mirror, such as “TI 3VOM” (for MOVE IT).

“One guy must have looked in his rearview mirror at an ambulance and said, ‘Oh, I can do this with a vanity plate,’“ Lonce says.

Lonce has also been successful at gathering stories locally through advertising—on diner placemats. The publisher of his newspaper publishes and prints the placemats and if they don’t sell out all the advertising spots they’ll give him one.

That’s how he met Alison Masry and her husband, Rudy. Alison donated a kidney to Rudy, who was suffering from end stage renal disease. Her New York plate says, “DONOR,” and his says “DONEE.” And now when people stop to ask them about their plates they promote organ donations by handing out brochures on the subject and organ donor forms.

But Lonce’s favorite vanity plate is his own, “LCNS2ROM,” which promotes his website, LCNS2ROM.com, which in turn promotes his book proposal. He still has no takers, but he remains confident: eventually, he believes, it will be hard for a publisher to ignore the numbers.

For more on this topic see " Dishing on Vanity Plates."