A brief recap: a few weeks ago I’d taken the $155,000 Range Rover I was testing out to run some errands with my wife in Plymouth, Minnesota. I was backing out of a parking space in front of my local Kohl’s when four cop cars came screaming up and “initiated a box and pin on the vehicle,” as the police report says. Hands on their guns, the officers ordered us out of the vehicle, patted us down, and eventually told us the Range Rover’s license plate—New Jersey 34 10 DTM—was stolen, they suspected the vehicle itself was stolen too, and they’d used Flock cameras to track me down over the last two days.
The scenario involving my wife and I is just one of many like it. Thomas noted that the system is 99% accurate today, but it’s performing 20 billion reads a month. That 1% error rate, of which I was a part of in June, makes for two hundred million misreads a month.
Not the guy you replied to, but plates have a purpose that are not necessarily compatible with Art and personalization. Not defending a broken society, just pointing it out.
They work perfectly fine. I’d argue these custom ones are easier to read and remember.
Honestly there’s no issues if you’re not a flock camera
If the same combination is issued multiple times then no, they don’t work as intended.
The issue here wasn’t that the license plate was too colorful, it was that the missing national standardisation allows for over a thousand cars with the same plate.
It’s not the same combination used multiple times it’s a similar combination from different states. Can you describe what the actual issue is here if you’re not a Flock camera? How often have you personally confused plates from two different vehicles?
In this case it was Flock cameras not reading the entire plate and omitting two numbers from it. If you’re really that concerned about plates getting mixed up, you should also be demanding that no two plates share similar numbers even when omitting some of the numbers from the sequence.
Which is why they don’t do that. 1 combination per state
So theoretically you can have the same combo 50 times, but it would be on 50 different state plates which are labeled as such.
You’ve made up a fake scenario that does not occur. There are not thousands of cars with the same plate.
Their purpose is perfectly compatible with art and personalization.