Some of you might remember one of the early MDP posts was a picture of one of the old Chesapeake Bay license plates. Well this is its modern day counterpart. Some of the big differences include the blue backround painted across the entire plate and the filled in bird, replacing the sketched bird in the older plates. What else? Well the bird is on the far side of the plate, not the middle.
For those of you outside the state, this might seem sort of inconsequential. However, a long time ago, Bay plates were very frequently found on cars in the state. It was an easy way to help the bay. Plus, in return you got a cool looking license plate. Now-a-days, these plates are much more rare.
What’s changed? Did moving the bird to the left keep people from buying them? Is it the painted background? Are people angry becasue this bird keeps stabbing the numbers of their license plate in the back? Am I looking in vain for a causation to this correlation?
5 responses so far ↓
1 shelly // Feb 25, 2009 at 9:20 AM
people don’t want to spend the extra $50 on Bay plates. which is why it should be a dealer incentive instead.
a lot of big car lots now do all their tags and title in house. so they should be making the donation to Save-The-Bay to get the plates, but not passing that cost on to the customer.
they could then get a tax write-off (or at least be able to say, ‘hey koons ford loves wildlife!’) and the customer wouldn’t have to pay extra for the plates.
my bay plates (that MDP photographed above, actually) came right from the dealer and i didn’t pay extra for them. (i mean, they could have just charged me $50 more for the car, but i wouldn’t have known…).
so i’m saving the bay. and color coordinating my license plates with my tiny bay-green car.
2 shelly // Feb 25, 2009 at 9:30 AM
also, and relevant to nothing, i really don’t like the “our farms, our future” plates.
in case anyone was wondering.
3 LEC // Feb 25, 2009 at 10:41 AM
Yay for George!
4 Gump // Feb 25, 2009 at 1:27 PM
They should have “Bomb the Bay” tags.
5 Joe Barsin // Jun 3, 2011 at 8:35 AM
Hi, I am the designer and illustrator of the new Bay plate. I just wanted to correct some of the factual error in your post. Sales of the new bay plate increased dramatically when we released the new design in 2004. In 2010, when Maryland released the “War of 1812″ plate, sales jumped again for the Bay plate. Once again, proving the publics appreciation of the plate design. Also, the bay plate only cost an extra $30 and a large percentage of that money goes to school grants to educate kids in taking care of our beautiful natural resource.
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