Mildly Interesting

I think I can shed some light on this. In California, you pretty much have to have a car. There are roughly 40 million residents in California. When you get a car, a license plate is issued. When you register a car, a license plate is issued. When you order a vanity plate, a license plate is issued. The same car can be registered to several license plates before any of them return to circulation. If a plate stays inactive for a number of years, then it returns to circulation to be reissued. I'm not sure about California, but some states it's 10 years, others have 20 years and I'm sure still others have other lengths of time for these numbers to expire. The reason for this is that you can let your registration lapse and still re-register your car once you can afford to do so. Or a car can sit in some legal dispute for a long period of time. Various reasons a car's registration may lapse but still want to be registered again some day. So let's say you buy a used car in California and then register new vanity plates on it. Let's also say you're the 3rd owner. It's not unreasonable that that particular car have 4 different license plate numbers associated with it that have not been reregistered or are currently in use. Also, many people own more than one car.