Get our free mobile app

Vanity (or personalized) license plates on vehicles can be fun and whimsical. Some owners get very creative when it comes to the right combination of letters and numbers to get their message across in those precious seven characters or less.

Personalized plates in Texas are big business. From April 2021 to September 2021, the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles approved a little over 41,700 personalized license plates to go on Texas cars and trucks. That's a lot of combinations! During that same time, Texas rejected a little more than 4,900 license plates because they didn't meet the state's criteria, or in some cases, exceeded it.

Through an open records request with the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles, I was able to obtain a list of all the denied personalized plates from Texans requesting them. We'll get to a few of the ones that made us laugh a bit along with some that we thought would be ok, but apparently didn't pass the state's standards for some reason. To see the complete list of denied plates from April, May, June, July, August, or September, just click on a month.

Texans have been personalizing their license plates since 1965. There is a group of four state employees in Austin that review each request and is either approved or denied.  After carefully reviewing more than 50,000 requests during this six month period, some requests were denied based upon the following standards:

  • it does not conflict with a current or proposed pattern issued by Texas
  • is not indecent
  • is not vulgar
  • is not derogatory
  • does not refer to race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, whether the reference is derogatory or not
  • does not contain illegal activity message
  • does not make a drug reference - substances, state of mind, glorification
  • does not make reference to gangs

Now if you think you have a clever combination to fit on a personalized plate, you can jump on over to My Plates and test out your combination and see if it's available. And while you're checking out all the denied plates, all the plate images you see can be personalized, along with hundreds more, on the My Plates site.

So the next time you're behind the wheel just look around and you'll begin to notice there are a ton of these vanity plates driving around. It's always fun to try to decipher all of them because they are not a

attachment-license plate-DNYD PL8 -1600 x 1067
loading...

Texas DMV Denies These Personalized License Plates

Vanity (or personalized) license plates on vehicles can be fun and whimsical. Some owners get very creative when it comes to the right combination of letters and numbers to get their message across in those precious seven characters or less. However, the State of Texas didn't approve the requests to have these personalized plates printed.

East Texas' Top 16 Craziest, Busiest, Hardest-to-Park-in Parking Lots

This doesn't mean the business is bad. In fact, usually it's the contrary. I'll park four blocks away from Stanley's and brave being run over by an ambulance on Beckham Avenue for a Mother Clucker, all while wondering to myself "how in the hell did this wild-ass intersection even come into existence?" every week.

Stay Away From Tyler's 15 Most Accident Prone Intersections and Streets

While vehicle accidents can occur wherever we drive, there are certain areas in Tyler that seem to have a higher number of traffic accidents than others. The following is a gallery of 15 Tyler intersections that had the most accidents in 2021 according to Tyler Police Department data.

These 10 Longview Intersections Had The Most Accidents In 2021

Longview drivers are not invincible when it comes to traffic accidents, these Longview intersections saw the most accidents in 2021 according to a report from the Longview Police Department.

More From Mix 93.1