alt Hacker News>have a generic plate that can go anywhere
Functionally, that's what already exists - the standards are dimensions and readability. There's no CA smog inspection station as you enter the state, this is about people abusing a loophole. I spent all 4 years of college in CA with a CA driver's license, a car with out of state plates, and zero Kafkaesque issues. Maybe tax avoidance loopholes are Kafkaesque because they're not how anyone is supposed to do things.
As one more wacky way to do it, some countries rivet the license plate to the car because the plates never change. They're basically shorthand for the VIN, so the owner and their place of residence don't matter, only where the car was first registered.
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its not abusing a loophole. if something isnt in a state for more than 50% of the calendar year the state should have no claim to it. its a federal matter at the point cross border taxation IMO.
The UK system associates the plates with your car. This incurs basically two pieces of paperwork online when you sell it, one of which is also annual taxation.
The administration has gradually modernized so that all the legal requirements of tax/registration/insurance can be checked online.
However, there's a loophole that's apparently becoming popular: "ghost plates". Number plates aren't a secure document. They have no authenticity markers. So you can just.. print your own, slap them on, and you're very unlikely to get police attention. A subset of that is plates which are IR scattering so they don't show up on speed cameras.