When you have a personalized license plate for your regular car and you buy a tailgating bus, you’re probably aren’t going to want to settle for a normal, standard, random, totally uncool license plate for said bus.
If only it were that easy.
Our best case scenario would have been an Iowa State University plate personalized MNCYFAM. Can you picture it?
Glorious! Alas it was not meant to be.
Although the bus was purchased in Iowa, will be stored in Iowa, and will only ever be operated exclusively within the boundaries of the State of Iowa, it has to be titled and registered in Minnesota because that’s where we live. I checked with Minnesota’s Driver and Vehicle Services. I called the deputy registrar for Story County, Iowa (where Iowa State University is located, figuring they would get this question most often) and got the same story. Minnesota resident, Minnesota plate. Sigh.
So I guess we’ll get a Minnesota personalized license plate then.
That will still be cool. So on a Saturday morning I headed to the local Minnesota deputy registrar to get the title and license plate for the bus.
Because of the weight of the bus (just an eensy weensy bit more than your average Prius) it’s not eligible for a passenger class plate. The lady helping me was very nice, but we went around and around trying to figure out how to classify it. Is it a bus? No, at least at that time, it had no seats. Is it an RV? No, it doesn’t provide independent electrical or running water or blah blah blah. In the end it was classified a truck, of all things, and as a result it gets saddled with a generic Y-class license plate.
Obviously not our plate number, but the basic design, courtesy of the Minnesota Driver and Vehicle Services website. Are we happy with it? No, not particularly.
Now that we’ve put seats into it, it may be possible that we could get it reclassified as a bus. However a bus is classified by Minnesota as:
- A motor vehicle designed for carrying more than 15 passengers including the driver and used for transporting persons
- A motor vehicle that is designed for carrying more than ten passengers including the driver, (ii) used for transporting persons, and owned by a nonprofit organization and not operated for hire or for commercial purposes
We have seating for maybe 10, but we’re definitely not a nonprofit organization. It seems unclear. It’s something I will probably check on to make sure we aren’t breaking any laws now that we have seats, but even then, it seems that buses classified as buses must have plates starting with “BY” so we’d be no closer to getting that personalized plate.
People have also suggested that I should have had Natalie’s dad (who lives in Iowa and stores the bus for us in the off-season) as a co-owner. Then with his Iowa driver license, we could apply for an Iowa plate. Though I’m not sure exactly how to do that now, after the title has already been issued, I’m sure there would be plenty of red tape, or I’d have to “sell” the bus to “us” in order to make it happen? That might even incur a new sales tax. For now, I’m not sure I want to go through all the red tape to try to make it happen.
I guess we’ll just have to get MNCYFAM on the bus some other way.
