I bought a new car in California last April, and the dealer applied for the tags. It took the state of CA at least 4 months to mail me the license plates. In the meantime I drove the car without license plates. After receiving the plates I didn’t put them on for another month or so. Bottom line: Nobody cares if you drive a car in CA with no license plates.
you’d last about 5 min. in MA. Getting pulled over ten times a day would be the norm.
No wonder Cali is in such financial trouble. Meh.
Bottom line: In California, the cops figure if you have no license plate you are probably an illegal alien and therefore a protected class. So why bother?
They do care if it looks like you had plates and removed them. If you get pulled over and they look up on the computer that you have your plates issued but you do not have them on you will be sited.
It depends where in California you live.
Some of the small towns in the Bay Area will pull you over in a heartbeat without plates.
Try driving in Tiburon/Belvedere with any type of infraction on your vehicle, and you will be stopped.
Guaranteed you won’t even make it out of town.
We live in CT, but my husband is from CA. We spent a lot of time in CA (mostly in the Bay Area) during the 1990s. It seemed to me that nearly every other car I saw had no license plate, or some temporary plate. I always thought it was so strange to see thousands of plate-less cars like that on the roads...