DMV nonsense

For those of you not in the US – DMV is our Division of Motor Vehicles. It is the agency (each state + autonomous districts have one) that deals with licensing drivers (all levels) and vehicles (again, anything wheeled with a motor entitled to use regular streets).  We will not talk about electric bikes here.

Any way. We purchased our current car back in late 2017 or so before the new models came out. It was new. It is a standard transmission VW Golf; we purchased it for a very good price. Nine years later, the license tags have been renewed annually. There have been a few parking tickets, routinely driving through the automated Toll booths on all three SF Bridges. The car has about 60k worth of miles on it.

George attempted to renew the tags on line and hit a snag. Our registration was correct. Our physical license plates were not.

What?

It seems that we were issued the WRONG NUMBER PLATES back in 2017 and have been driving on an incorrect plate number for nine years. Now I totally agree with a friend of mine: the first thing you do when you get license plates is check them against your registration.  Now looking back at the time frame, I was just starting to grow my hair back from chemo and we were shortly headed back to Germany for a cruise going to Iceland & Greenland. So, I never double checked the license plates against the registration. Obviously, George didn’t either.

( Note, for UASREUR,  USAFE-UK, Germany, Switzerland, plates didn’t  arrive in the mail, you have to physically trade in the temp at the registration office where both you and the clerk verified everything before you went out the door).

Fast forward to 2026. That is right. All those years of annual renewal which consisted of filling out the form, paying the price, getting a new sticker in the mail and slapping it on the plate. Never once did anyone compare the registration to the plate. To be fair, obviously our car insurance folks didn’t either.

I am not sure how the error got discovered. My guess is that the person with our plates had to make a transaction and their incorrect plates were discovered. When run – the computer pointed to us.

I am hopeful George can have this dealt with by COB (close of business).

In any case, I wound up searching back through old posts to see if I could pin down the actual date we purchased the car but no luck.

And, if you have gotten this far – please reassure yourself (if you have a car) that its plate and the plate number on your registration match.