As we said in the introduction, license plates on cars are so common that we usually don’t really think about their existence, we just know they do. Apparently, some people do, like this Redditor. 

According to Wikipedia, all countries require these plates for vehicles like cars, trucks, and motorcycles, while jurisdictions about it being mandatory for bikes, boats, and tractors depend from place to place.

What also varies by location is how the license plates look. From differing fonts and colors to different amounts or places of numbers and letters – each country makes it their own. There’s a site called “License Plates of the World”, where you can check out what they look like around the world. 

At the same time, in some countries, there’s an option for so-called vanity plates. Others simply call them personalized or custom plates. As the name suggests, it’s when a vehicle owner gets a plate with their choice of numbers or letters, usually to portray a certain phrase, word or abbreviation. They can write essentially anything, as long as it is not banned. 

Plus, they need to pay extra for this. Again, the price depends on the place where one orders such a plate. As an example, we can take pricing from myplates.com, where the cheapest option is $50, while the priciest is $570.

This brings us to today’s main topic – weird license plates. There’s a whole Instagram account called “Bogan Plates” that is dedicated to sharing interesting plates caught in the wild. Well, in their bio, they call these plates something a bit more derogatory, but we think interesting is a better word here.  

The account was created more than 10 years ago – in February of 2013 – and has since collected over 30K followers. Granted, they also have over 2K posts, which just shows how common odd license plates are.

For this list, we picked out some of them we thought were the most entertaining. It includes such pearls like “Are u ok”, “useless” and “guccci”, to name a few. To quote a popular TikTok meme, “Everybody’s so creative!”

You might wonder why people pay quite a lot of money to get these vanity plates when simple ones work just as well. One of the main reasons that people do that is personalization. Getting stuff tailored makes people feel more satisfaction from owning it. Plus, this way they can show off something about themselves, whether it’s their achievements, personality traits, or their sense of humor. 

Well, as long as these plates aren’t used to hurt anyone’s feelings, they’re pretty harmless, quite entertaining, and bring some amusing oddness into our lives. 

Do you have a vanity plate? Why did you get it? Share with us in the comments!