A Lamborghini owner in Texas had a vanity license plate application rejected by the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles after officials determined that the requested combination of letters or numbers crossed the line into content the agency considers offensive or inappropriate for display on public roadways. The owner’s creative plate choice for what is presumably a distinctive luxury sports car generated more attention from the rejection than it likely would have received if simply approved, as these denials routinely become news stories that give the plate’s content far more public visibility than the vehicle itself would have attracted.
State DMV vanity plate approval processes vary considerably in their standards and the consistency of their application across similar applications, creating a system where similar content may be approved in one state and rejected in another or approved in one year and rejected in another for the same state. The subjective nature of the offense determination creates outcomes that seem arbitrary from the outside, and the Texas case has attracted the kind of bemused commentary that these stories reliably generate. The owner will presumably need to choose a less controversial personalization for the Lamborghini’s plate.
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