You probably surmised from the lack of a November license plate post that there was nothing new to report. There wasn’t. December was a bust as well, not surprisingly, so the map looks just like it did at the end of August. This is par for the course. The last four months of the year rarely yield more than three or four new plates, and usually it’s less than that.

2019 does go down in my license plate history as the year that North Dakota showed up, the first time in over two decades. And in February. That’s big.

Now January is upon us, and January is the most fun month in the license plate game. There are only five states on the map at the moment, mainly because I’ve barely been on the road at all, and all five — Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Connecticut — are predictable. Often, though, something from farther afield turns up in the top five or so: one year it was Louisiana facrissake. And some New England states are harder to get than you’d expect, like in 2019 New Hampshire and Maine were #16 and #18 respectively.