License to Drive

Growing up in the Detroit area, I thought I pretty much had seen it all when it came to people being obsessed with their cars. It wasn't until I moved out east that I learned about an automotive obsession that for whatever reason, never seemed to take hold in the motor city. The obsession I'm speaking of is the desire to have the smallest possible license plate number. I thought it was specific to Rhode Island, where license plate numbers can be (and often are) passed on to your descendants, but it's even more popular in Delaware, the only state that allows for easy license plate number transferals. Delaware license plate #6 just fetched $675,000 at auction, the most a license plate has ever sold for in the US. That may sound like a lot of money to pay for a license plate, but when you consider that Abu Dhabi's #1 license plate sold for the equivalent of $14.2 million last week, it seems like quite the steal.