My entire adult life, I’ve heard various people tell me that I need to score my tabs after putting them on “so no one can steal them”. I’ve known many people like myself that find this idea absurd, and don’t bother with scoring. How did this idea become mainstream advice?
Uhm… what are “vehicle tabs” ?
EDIT: Oh, tags. I guess it’s the anual sticker proving that your registration is up to date. Don’t have those here anymore. My previous car had the 2012 stickers still when I sold it last year.
TIL i have been blessed with pre-cut tabs my whole life. Ontario and BC had fancy stickers to make them hard to steal, I never understood why. Eventually we got rid of them.
I’ve never had them stolen myself.
In PA, when they used to still use them, they had little wedge shapes cut into them when you got them, so once you put them on, they couldn’t be removed intact.
Because they couldn’t be removed, you’d see tons of cars with the corner of the license plate cut off.
Pennsylvania finally stopped using the registration stickers a few years ago.
No point to the registration stickers anymore anyway. The license plate scanners already know everything about you.
Lmao that’s hilarious
Apparently tabs are tags.
Alberta got rid of them eight years ago or so, but before that they were extremely one-use items. Super-fragile with an incredibly strong glue. You could NOT have remove them with a razor blade and the precision of a master jeweller.
Besides, annual registration is what - 80 bucks? Not worth it.
See, that’s exactly where my confusion comes from too! The adhesive on those things are incredible. I’m afraid to fuck up when I put them on, because there’s no fixing it
I had my plates stolen several years ago, if that counts!
Real talk: the cops only look at the stickers if they want an excuse to pull you over.
For every thing else they run your plates- and usually before they even do that much. If your registration is current, then, they may just be letting you know they got ripped off, or checking if your drunk or just incredibly bored.
That said… if someone goes to the trouble of peeling off a sticker, it’s not going to do all that much good, and probably catch them more charges than just being unregistered.
(More likely they’d steal the entire plates. Particularly one from a similar car to yours- color, make, model, year, etc.)
I got pulled over by a cop for “expired tabs” because I was out of state and my husband had not put them on my car while I was gone and I didn’t realize. The cop walks up loudly states YOURE BEING RECORDED, points to his camera and tells me my tags are expired and he wanted my info. I had my license but not insurance on me so I had to call my spouse who’s like “can’t the cop just look it up?” The cop came up as my husband was talking over my car speakers and heard a man and was immediately deflated, hung his head, said he didn’t care and walked away like wtf??
I almost got my car towed because I left for work at 8am in a spot that had no parking after 7am with tabs that were over a year due. The only reason I didn’t get towed was because I got to the car while the meter maid was still entering info before the truck took it. It was already there and just waiting for authorization
You were almost certainly getting towed regardless of your registration status. It takes maybe five minutes to slap a parking ticket on a car. Typical response time for towing is typically north of 30 minutes unless there’s some type of “it’s dangerous” involved.
That truck was there when they started their round. Probably because they were having problems with people overstaying. (Or they’re dicks.)
Another poster mentioned that PA stopped requiring them a few years back (I think it was more than a few), but shortly after they stopped requiring them a NY cop pulled me over and said that was the reason. I thought that was pretty unlikely since NY cops wouldn’t waste their time on minor out of state bureaucratic issues. When I told him that they weren’t required he seemed skeptical but went back to his car. After a while he came back a said I could go.
Yup. The only reason places still use them is to give yet another pretext for stopping people.
Same, for example, the little dinky plate lamp being out, or failing to signal for the proper distance (a few hundred feet, usually.)
Cops don’t care if your car’s registration is up to date. They use it as an excuse to get to more juicy charges.
I think it’s largely dependant on location. I live in the northeast US and never heard of this before my cousin moved to California and has his registration sticker stolen the day after he got Cali plates.
I used to do this but now my state has virtual registration so they don’t send us free stickers in the mail.
I have.
Interesting. When did it happen?
Ummm. The summer of 1994? I went into a head shop to chat and buy rolling papers. When I came out, someone had used tin-snips to remove the entire corner of the plate.
That’s wild
If you can, put the tag in the center of the plate. A border accessory is also a good deterrent.
A few quick slices? No biggie
My dad did once. Stolen off his pickup while on a work parking lot
I have never heard this in my life. It never even occured to me someone might steal them!
I’ve only ever heard the advice to perforate the vehicle registration sticker from one person, but supposing that it has become normalized advice, I have to imagine that it’s due to the low-effort, not necessarily the extraordinary security that it provides.
In a related situation, I’m often confused at folks who don’t lock their cars when going to the shops, since it’s adding an extra barrier for an opportunistic thief to cross. There’s no question that a motivated thief could just take a brick to the window, but it is indeed low effort to lock the car and if that’s enough to dissuade one theft of the car’s coin tray, then that’s good enough.
It is, after all, quite hard to prove a negative so we can’t really know how much theft it deters. But it is very clear that a perforated registration sticker destroys any value to anyone who would even contemplate stealing it. But as you say, if there were zero such people to begin with, then it can’t really be reduced further.
No because this is a double solved issue in Australia. Firstly the sticker was single application from the inside of the car. If you tried to remove it parts of the info would be left behind in the window which alsoade it a pain to replace them every year. Also if you have broken into the car may as well drive off with it.
Secondly, we don’t have them anymore cop cars have plate readers and a hook into the department of transportation so they can look up if the rego has been paid.I used to live in a bad place, people would steal anything and everything. I had to lock up everything, hide everything of value. Yes I cut up the registration sticker into 50 pieces to prevent theft. I have seen them stolen before.
