A couple of days after I was seeing “blackout” style license plates showing up in regular alphanumeric sequence, WHO had a story about expansion of the program.
The blackout plates rolled out on July 1st, and Lowe said just a few months in they’ve sold almost 10,000 of them, raising almost $400,000.
Iowa has too many specialty plates, period. The “city and country reboot” voted for over two other kind-of-middling options at the Iowa State Fair is just different enough from the 1997 version that they’re mismatched. Admittedly, being saddled with a strip in that shade of mid-2010s green, or close to it, doesn’t help.
I don’t think either design has ever been super-popular, but this is pretty much an outright rebellion. Remember, the “blackout” plates are here because people kept buying Dordt College University plates and covering up the identifiers.
And now Johnson County can’t keep them on the shelves (KCRG) — which may be more for Hawkeye-related reasons.
Personally, I think the ideal plate was the white-on-blue 1986 series, not (just) because I grew up with them, but they were simple and unpretentious — and embossed, which we don’t get anymore. In that sense, the blackout plates are merely trying to return to that. Maybe we should go full-on Delaware and make them not just basic but hereditary. (We can’t truly do that because Iowa’s too big. But you get the frustration.)
UPDATE: Polk County sold out of blackout plates. And Linn. And, almost a week ago, Cerro Gordo.