License Plate Trivia
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113 free License Plate trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
68 free License plate trivia questions with answers. License plates are the most-read documents on Earth and almost nobody knows their history. This quiz covers the whole story: the Paris ordinance of 1893, the leather and porcelain tags of early motoring, wartime fiberboard, and the 1956 deal that fixed the six-by-twelve-inch size still on every North American car. You will meet the state slogans and the fights behind them, from Idaho's 1928 potato to the Supreme Court case over Live Free or Die, plus Delaware's six-figure low-number market, prison plate shops, D.C.'s protest slogan and diplomatic codes. Then it goes abroad: British age identifiers and record auctions, the EU blue band, German city codes and FE-Schrift, and Japan's yellow kei plates. Questions run from easy to expert, so it works for a road trip, a pub round or a collectors' night. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia and primary sources.
30 of 113 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which country introduced the first vehicle registration plates, by an 1893 police ordinance?
France
France got there first: a Paris police ordinance of August 1893 made motorists carry a plate showing the owner's name and address, three years before Germany followed.
Q 02Which US state was the first to issue license plates itself, on September 1, 1903?
Massachusetts
Massachusetts became the first state to issue its own plates on September 1, 1903; plate number 1 went to Frederick Tudor, and his descendants kept it for over a century.
Q 03Which state was first to require vehicle registration in 1901, initially just the owner's initials?
New York
New York required vehicle registration from 1901, with owners making plates bearing their initials; numbers replaced initials in 1903, and the state only began issuing plates in 1910.
Q 04Which state has featured a bucking horse and rider on its plates continuously since 1936?
Wyoming
Wyoming put the bucking horse and rider on its 1936 plates after Secretary of State Lester Hunt picked a drawing by Denver artist Allen True; Hunt later said it showed no particular horse.
Q 05George Maynard was jailed for 15 days in the 1970s for taping over which motto on his plates?
Live Free or Die
Maynard, a Jehovah's Witness, taped over the 'Live Free or Die' motto on his plates and served 15 days in jail; the Supreme Court later ruled he could not be forced to display it.
Q 06Which state's license plates carry the slogan 'Show-Me State'?
Missouri
Missouri plates carry the slogan 'Show-Me State'; the nickname is commonly traced to an 1899 speech by Congressman Willard Vandiver, who said, 'I am from Missouri, you have got to show me.'
Q 07Which state has issued the same gold-on-blue standard plate design since the late 1950s?
Delaware
Delaware introduced its reflective gold-on-blue plate in 1958 and added 'The First State' four years later; it is also the only state that lets drivers have legal plates made privately, as replicas of its old porcelain tags.
Q 08In 2008, plate number 6 from the state famous for its low-digit plate market sold for about how much?
$675,000
$675,000 bought tag number 6 because the state first handed out plates in numerical order, so a low digit marks one of its oldest motoring families; number 20 fetched $410,000 in 2018.
Q 09In the state where low-number plates are traded as status symbols, plate 1 is reserved for which official?
Governor
Tag 1 is reserved for the governor, with 2 and 3 going to the lieutenant governor and secretary of state; every number from 4 upward can be bought and sold.
Q 10As of 2014, how many US states used prison labor to make their license plates?
40
The federal government does too, which is why 'making license plates' became slang for serving a prison sentence.
Q 11Which of these states requires only a rear license plate on standard passenger cars?
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania asks standard passenger cars for a rear plate only, yet still makes press photographers and state-owned cars carry one on the front as well; Maryland and California, by contrast, require both.
Q 12Which state stopped requiring front license plates on July 1, 2020?
Ohio
Ohio stopped requiring front plates on July 1, 2020, a change projected to save $1.4 million a year; the State Highway Patrol had objected that the front plate helped it trace hit-skip drivers.
Q 13Which state's governor rejected 9,000 pairs of new plates in the early 1970s because the flag's stars were shown as dots?
Alaska
Q 21Which state's license plates spell out 'USA' after the state name?
New Mexico
New Mexico first added 'USA' after its name in 1969, dropped it in the mid-1970s and brought it back around 1988; today's plates read 'New Mexico USA'.
Q 22Most modern plates are made from which metal?
Aluminium
Aluminium is the usual metal for modern plates; many early ones were steel coated in porcelain, which soon proved too expensive to turn out in the numbers motorists needed.
Q 23Which vehicles were left out of the 1956 agreement that standardized North American plates at 6 by 12 inches?
Motorcycles
Motorcycles were exempt when the US, Canada and Mexico agreed with carmakers on a 6-by-12-inch plate with standard mounting holes; bike plates were never standardized and mostly settled at 4 by 7 inches.
Alaska's William Egan refused the plates, made for 1973, because the stars of the state flag were rendered as dots; never issued, they became common collectors' items.
Q 14Which state's plates carry the slogan 'Sportsman's Paradise'?
Louisiana
Louisiana's plates carry 'Sportsman's Paradise', first stamped on them in 1958 as 'Sportsmen's Paradise'; the state swapped it for 'Bayou State' in 1974, then brought it back within a few years.
Q 15Which state's standard license plate depicts Mount Rushmore?
South Dakota
South Dakota's plates have shown Mount Rushmore in some form since 1952; about 90 percent of the memorial was blasted out with dynamite by a crew of nearly 400 between 1927 and 1941.
Q 16'Greatest Snow on Earth' is a plate slogan of which state?
Utah
Utah adopted 'Greatest Snow on Earth' with its skier plate in 1985; when the plate was redrawn in 2007, three-time Olympian Heidi Voelker became the skier pictured on it.
Q 17'First in Flight' has appeared on which state's plates since 1982?
North Carolina
North Carolina has used 'First in Flight' since 1982 for the Wright brothers' 1903 flights at Kitty Hawk; the brothers' home state answers on its own plates with 'Birthplace of Aviation'.
Q 18Which slogan has appeared on Maine's license plates since 1936?
Vacationland
Vacationland first appeared on Maine's plates in 1936 and has survived every redesign since, including the red lobster plate of 1987 and the chickadee that replaced it in 1999.
Q 19Since 1954, Illinois plates have carried which slogan?
Land of Lincoln
Illinois has printed 'Land of Lincoln' on its plates since 1954, though Abraham Lincoln was born in a Kentucky log cabin and raised partly in Indiana; he only arrived in Illinois at 21.
Q 20To conserve metal during World War II, Illinois made its 1943 plates from what material?
Fiberboard
Illinois pressed its 1943 plates from fiberboard to save steel for the war effort, and kept making them that way through 1948, three years after the war had ended.
Q 24Which part of Canada has issued polar-bear-shaped plates since 1970?
Northwest Territories
The Northwest Territories introduced its polar-bear-shaped plate in 1970 to mark the territory's centennial, and the bear outline is now a registered trademark.
Q 25Which state's green license plates are the only ones in the US with the number pressed in rather than raised?
Vermont
Vermont makes its plates in reverse: a rectangle is raised from the sheet, the characters are pressed back down into it, and green paint is rolled across the raised face.
Q 26Which California city piloted battery-powered digital license plates in 2018?
Sacramento
Sacramento was the test city when California began piloting digital plates in 2018; the number shows on an electronic-paper screen, the kind used in e-readers, that can change what it displays.
Q 27In a 2007 survey, which state had vanity plates on the highest share of its vehicles, about one in six?
Virginia
Virginia led the 2007 survey with vanity plates on about 16% of its vehicles, helped by a fee of just $10 a year; Illinois had the largest total, nearly 1.3 million, despite charging $78.
Q 28Which state's plates still picture the Old Man of the Mountain, a rock profile that collapsed in 2003?
New Hampshire
New Hampshire has kept the Old Man of the Mountain on its standard plate since 1999, even though the granite profile fell from its perch on Cannon Mountain on May 3, 2003.
Q 29Which message on a Los Angeles driver's vanity tag brought him around 2,500 parking tickets in 1979?
NO PLATE
Robert Barbour's 'NO PLATE' vanity plate matched what officers wrote on tickets for cars without plates, so about 2,500 Los Angeles citations were mailed to him in 1979.
Q 30Which state passed a 2015 law removing most censorship from its vanity plate program?
Maine
Maine's 2015 law stripped the Secretary of State of the power to reject offensive vanity plates, and a wave of vulgar plates followed until the legislature restored review in 2021.