Editor’s note: This is part of The Know’s series, Staff Favorites. Each week, we offer our opinions on the best that Colorado has to offer for dining, shopping, entertainment, outdoor activities and more. (We’ll also let you in on some hidden gems.
Every car trip in Colorado is a lesson in current events, a narrative story laid out in tiny details.
In just a few blocks in the city, we can learn about immigration policy from the window washers on the corner, homelessness, economics and the culture wars on bumper stickers.
On the highway, it’s more about tourism, population growth, infrastructure and the interplay between local, state and federal government agencies.
Among the plots and the subtexts are license plates. Is an RV from New Mexico driving slowly in the left lane? Is an Audi with California plates weaving in and out of traffic? Maybe a car with red and white rental plates cut you off, or someone with a “Respect Life” plate flipped you off.
One of the stories from the past two years has been the growing popularity of blacked-out “retired” license plates that the Colorado Division of Motor Vehicles began issuing in 2023 for $25. They became the top-selling plate that year when motorists ordered 170,000 of them. And 2024 was even busier. Through November, more than 353,300 black plates had been issued altogether – making up a whopping 5.68% of all registered Colorado plates, which is a lot when you consider that there are more than 200 different possible designs available.
The “blackout” plates are definitely cool looking, especially if you drive a black or white car. But they aren’t my favorites, because they don’t tell any kind of story about Colorado.
No, the best plates are the “historic” ones – although calling them historic is difficult for me since the years from 1982 to 1999, when they were standard, doesn’t seem like that long ago. These are the plates with Colorado’s mountains printed in green, with the sky and numbers and letters in white (the opposite scheme of today’s standard-issue plates). They are bold and distinctive and immediately recognizable as Colorado. The DMV issued 6,794 of them in 2024, at $25 a pop.
They are also iconic because they are the model for the “Native” bumper stickers you see around town. Those stickers and the term “native” are controversial now because some people believe it should only be applied to descendants of Indigenous cultures and not to people who were simply born in Colorado. But 40 years ago, they were controversial for a different reason: People used them as a way to let everyone around them in traffic know that they were born in Colorado.
What followed was a 1980s bumper sticker war, where everyone used the green and white design to communicate or satirize their own positions, feelings or hobbies. Semi-Native, Transplant, Alien, Who Cares, We Care, Naive, Musician, Radical, Ski Bum and many more.
Of course, the best kind of Colorado resident, whether they were born here or not, is respectful of other people here — and of the environment. And the one that doesn’t cut me off in traffic.