Georgia License Plates: Why So Many Designs?

I’m not even talking about the specialty plates here in Georgia, like those for the area colleges or that support a cause (the state says there are more than 300 of those). No, I’m talking about the standard, state-issued plate; the one you get when you don’t want to pay any more than you have to in order to be street-legal.

There’s the one with the big, fuzzy-looking peach in the middle and the words “Georgia on my mind” up top that pays homage to the state song.

Then there’s the license plate with the state surrounded by an outline of a peach set to a background that fades from grey to white. There’s also the same plate but minus the gray shading.

And don’t forget the two newest plates: the bucolic – some might say busy – scene of a peach tree farm, and the one I like to call the “minimalist peach,” just a bright orange peach in the center set on a white background.

“The objective is to give people a choice. People like choices,” says state Rep. Tom Rice, who oversees the House Motor Vehicles Committee.

Every plate redesign has to go through his committee for approval, but that doesn’t explain why there are so many.

Full disclosure: This question has been on my mind since I moved to Georgia about a year and a half ago. In my home state of Illinois, there’s just the one plate featuring President Abraham Lincoln’s smirking face. But in Georgia, you’ll see at least five different generic plates on the road at any given time.

For answers, I headed to the south end of Fulton County to the state building where license plates are printed.

It’s not a prison; it’s a printing plant run by the Georgia Department of Revenue’s Motor Vehicle Division.

“Nothing in the state of Georgia is made within the correctional industries,” says Robert Johnson, who’s with the company that prints Georgia’s plates, 3M.

Johnson says 3M has been printing Georgia’s plates since 2012. He says when the company took over printing, the state decided to update its license plate designs, which usually happens every five to seven years. Officials put a few options up to a vote, and the winner was the farm scene design, the one with the words “peach state” on top.

Johnson says I wasn’t alone in thinking it was a little busy.

“That one was a little much for some people to take, so they came up with an alternate,” Johnson says. “It sort of piggy backs on what they had before with the peach in the middle. So, yeah, that was quite an event.”

So instead of one new license plate, the state opted to put two designs into production. With the new plates a go, Johnson says there was supposed to be a re-plate, meaning those with older license plates would be automatically prompted to get a new one.

“We did phase into a re-plate for about eight months, and then it was stopped,” Johnson says.

Motor Vehicle Division Director Georgia Steele says the state was in the process of removing the “Georgia on my mind plates,” which were issued in 1997 and are the oldest ones still legal. However, the department halted the phase-out in the middle of the project because the cost was too much to absorb.

“We have almost 9 million here in the state,” Steele says. “We’re the eighth largest registration state, so the cost impact on the state’s budget ─ and also the division’s budget ─ I mean, it took a huge hit.”

The revenue department couldn’t give an exact amount on how much a plate redesign costs but says it’s in the millions of dollars.

Steele says anyone with a worn out “Georgia on my mind” plate can swap it out for one of the new plates free of charge, but it’s not a requirement. For those who are newly registered drivers in the state, they only get to choose between the peach farm scene plate and the minimalist peach.

Still, Steele says there’s no timeline for the phase-out to pick back up. 

“We are having conversations about the directions going forward in terms of doing the re-plating, but right now, in terms of an actual action plan in place, we just want to make sure we’re doing it at the right time,” Steele says.

Which brings us back to why you’ll see the Georgia on my mind license plate, and the peach outline license plate and the farm scene plate and the minimalist peach while you’re cruising down state roads.