If you’ve ever registered a car at your local DMV, you’ve likely seen a checkbox on the registration document marking whether or not you’d like to register your car as a classic or historical vehicle. In many cases, checking this box does more than get you a different license plate. It could make you eligible for lower registration costs or cheaper insurance premiums.
Registering a car as a classic can come with some restrictions, too. In many states, there are rules against using vehicles registered with historical plates for daily transportation. Wisconsin is especially strict with its collector and hobbyist plates. To make sure you don’t use the plates improperly, the state requires you to have a daily driver registered in your name before it will issue you plates. If your classic is jointly owned, both drivers have to have registered daily drivers before Wisconsin will issue these plates.
Currently, Minnesota has some similar rules in place for its collector plates. According to the state’s DMV website, owners have to certify they already own a daily driver, and the car can’t be used for general transportation. While the agency uses driving to and from car shows and parades as examples of acceptable use, there aren’t any explicit rules for where and when you can drive. If this new bill is signed into law, though, vintage car owners with historical license plates could face a lot more restrictions.
The bill, titled HF (House File) 3865, would establish a host of new rules for owning, registering, and operating classic cars in Minnesota. A classic car can be registered in a few different ways through the Minnesota DMV. There are standard “collector” plates, where any car that is at least 20 years old, but newer than 1935, is eligible. Then there are “classic” plates, where only vehicles built between 1925 and 1948, and designated as a classic car by the Classic Car Club of America, are eligible. Then there are “street rod” plates, which can only be registered to vehicles built before 1949 and “designed and manufactured” to resemble a street rod. Finally, there are “pioneer” plates, which can only be registered to cars built before 1936. Oh, and there are also classic motorcycle plates, which follow similar rules to the “collector” plates, in that the bike has to be at least 20 years old to qualify.
This new bill would apply to all of the above plates, as well as military vehicles that are at least 20 years old. Here’s the paragraph you have to concern yourself with:
Subd. 5. Vehicle operation. A person may operate a vehicle registered in the collector class under subdivision 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d, or 1h, or under section 168.105, solely as a collector’s item and not for general transportation purposes. Operation as a collector’s item includes: (1) transportation for a collector vehicle club activity, exhibition, tour, parade, or similar use; and (2) operation on Saturday and Sunday from sunrise to sunset.
Alright, there are a couple of things to point out here. First, subdivisions 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d, 1h, and section 168.105 refer to all of the historical plate types I listed above. Next, according to the above text, this proposal would clarify what these cars can be used for, specifically noting driving to a collector vehicle club event, a car show, a tour, a parade, or similar.
On its surface, this feels only a tiny bit more restrictive than the current rules, which only allude to this type of restriction, but don’t explicitly state it. But it’s an important distinction to make. Whereas before, you could very easily get away from driving pretty much anywhere with your classic, this bill would assign specific use cases you’d have to adhere to.
This new restriction would only apply on weekdays, according to the bill. Going by the last line in that paragraph, drivers of classic cars will be able to drive their vehicles freely throughout Saturday and Sunday, but only during daylight hours. This is painfully vague and leaves the language up to some serious interpretation. How it’s written now, it suggests that vintage cars would only be allowed to drive on weekdays if they’re on their way to a show or other official exhibition use, and they wouldn’t be allowed to drive on the road at all whenever the sun goes down on the weekend.
This raises lots of questions, obviously. What qualifies as a sanctioned event? Could I still go on a casual cruise to meet a few friends in a parking lot on a Tuesday night? Is that considered an “exhibition?” What if I need to drive the car to my local workshop for a repair? Most shops aren’t open on the weekend, so would I have to have the car towed there? And for the love of all that is holy, why can’t I drive my classic car to the drive-in on a Saturday night? Has the writer of this bill ever heard of a sunset cruise?
Curious to know what those in the Minnesota classic car community think about this, I reached out to a couple of car clubs.
“I do think the language of the bill is problematic,” Cameron Parkhust, president of the BMW Car Club of America North Star chapter, told me over the phone. “The restrictions that are proposed, if strictly enforced, don’t make sense and are not workable.”
Parkhurst went on to say that people in his circle will often go to drive-ins and smaller meets, like Cars and Coffee events, on weekdays, and expressed worries about how people will get their cars repaired. “It’s too restrictive,” he said.
Gary Watkins, president of the Corvettes of MN club, told me most of his members wouldn’t be affected, as very few run collector plates. Nonetheless, he was far more blunt with his assessment of the bill: “It’s a stupid waste of time proposal,” he told me over email.
I’ve reached out to state representative Meg Luger-Nikolai, the bill’s sole sponsor, to get some clarity on the wording and find out why she’s trying to impose these restrictions. Neither her nor Governor Tim Walz’s office has gotten back to me. Most people online speculate that the cheaper cost associated with registering a car as a collector compared to a normal registration is the likely reason for the push.
Either way, if I were a Minnesotan with one of these plates on the back of my car, I wouldn’t be too worried. These sorts of restrictions are rarely enforced, at least going by my own experience. I street-parked an old BMW 3-Series for nearly two years and used it nearly every day on a historical registration, and was never called out for it. Parkhurst mentioned to me that he’s never seen Minnesota’s current laws on classic car driving restrictions enforced.
Plus, the bill’s chances of passing aren’t exactly clear right now. A couple of Facebook groups report that the bill was dismissed from the house discussion for the year, though I haven’t seen that reported anywhere else. Even if it passes through the legislature, the proposal also has to be signed into law by Walz, a noted vintage car enthusiast who owns a 1979 International Harvester Scout II. Whether that means the car community could win sympathy from him is unclear.
If you live in the North Star state and feel strongly enough about this, I suggest reaching out to your representative. It might feel like your call or email is going into a black hole, but it’s certainly better than nothing. You could also just re-register your car normally, with standard Minnesota plates. It’s a bit pricier, but if it means avoiding these restrictions altogether, then it might be worth the trouble.
Top graphic images: DepositPhotos.com
They don’t enforce way more serious things in MN wo why worry about the plates? Seems like a stupid law though, if I owned a classic I certainly wouldn’t apply for those plates, assuming I would have control over which plate I could order.
This is a horrible law. Even if you only use the car on the weekends, there will be occasions when you need to drive it to the shop for repairs.
It’s to keep people from driving old cars AND getting the low tax historical plates.
Michigan went the other way, which relegated historical plated cars are legal to drive Memorial-Labor days (summer basically), or to applicable events outside that window.
Normal plates/registration for my 1989 Foxbody Drag car (EFI 545ci BBF on E85 700hp/700lbft) are roughly $90 a year and require active insurance to renew. Collector plate/registration was $32 for 10 years. Considering that car may drive 15 miles a year total, it’s well within the spirit of the law.
Surprisingly I see very little abuse of the law, likely due to being obscure and rather high visibility to law enforcement when abused.
Here in Western PA, nice weather started in March and has been running through November anymore. Realistically, you are only looking at 3-4 months when running a classic is inadvisable. It is 75 and sunny today, if I had a classic seems like a perfect day for a juant.
Reminds me of the movie “Up in Smoke.”
When the cop pulls Cheech and Chong over and asks “how long have you been out driving?”
“A week, a day. A week day.”
So old people with historic cars could no longer treat weekdays like weekends?
…but why?
In any case, you could make a case that limiting use to Saturday and Sunday is religious discrimination because it halves the time available to people of faiths with strict a sabbath, like the using electricity on shabbat.
All but 1 of my vehicles are old enough to qualify for historical plates, and historical plates are significantly cheaper than normal plates+registration. The spirit is to keep collector/historical cars legal without penalizing them with extremely high taxes per mile driven. For a car that may get driven low triple digit miles a year, it doesn’t make sense to tax them the same as a 14,000-16,000 mile daily driver, but it does make sense for people to just skip paying registration and hope they don’t get caught.
My first thought is the sponsor was given a
bribedonation by insurance companies to push people into standard registrations so they could sell more policies based on everyday use.When I was a kid and my parents inherited a ’64 Galaxie 500; my dad tracked down a year of manufacture plate as soon as he could. I didn’t understand at the time why he just didn’t get an antique auto plate, but he did drive it to work or on errands occasionally.
Honestly the whole vintage plate thing is just another example of where we tax things at too high a rate (in this case car registrations), so then we have to create carve-outs for special interests (in this case vintage car owners), which then inevitably becomes a loophole for tax dodgers (2001 Camry owners daily driving supposedly limited-use vehicles), which then results in complex additional rules and costly additional enforcement. And for what? A few million in extra tax revenue? This pattern repeats itself all over in our tax code.
Honestly the state should just set registration at a flat low rate for everybody regardless of vehicle, retire half the DMV, and raise their gas tax by a few basis points to cover the revenue loss. Then their LEOs can spend their time enforcing actual traffic safety instead of trying to figure out if a cars and coffee at 3pm two counties over qualifies as a reason to be driving a 1984 Datsun at 11am on a Tuesday.
What a waste of time and energy.
The problem is there’s a massively disparate impact. The historical plate tax rate is an example of a progressive tax system, where the lowest mile driven vehicles (and thus least amount of wear and tear on roads/infrastructure) are also taxed at the lowest rates.
This way they capture some extra revenue instead of having to tie up more police resources writing expired registration tickets to classic car owners.
Don’t waste your time. Just register the car and get classic car insurance. That ultimately has the real limitations on the use of your vehicle.
The historic plates often look good. Insurers may have specific requirements as well. Here in NY, I am able to have vintage plates on my 1990s cars, but only if they have Historic registration. The tax is a minuscule part of the equation.
$90/1 yr vs $32/10 years for one of my vehicles in Michigan. It gets transferred from storage insurance to basic when it’s actually legal to drive on the historical plates.
That’s a $868 savings, plus not having to renew the registration each year. It gets driven maybe 15 miles a year (drag car). If I had to pay regular rates for registration, I’d have to get ticketed 4x a year to not save money.
Now that gets me wondering. My daily driver is a 24 year old Camry. Could I save money by putting historic plates on a 24 year old vanilla Camry?
I was walking my dog the other day and noticed a 90’s Lexus with classic car plates on it, so why not? If I put my ’00 Firebird back on the road, I’ll probably go that route if it makes sense.
It’s so weird to think about. Looked it up, 30 years old in my state. That’s a 1996. So, I could get a Sunfire and put antique car plates on it. I think as an antique car as being something from the 50s, not the 90s.
Time marches on, ehh? I hear a ’90s band come on the radio, takes me back to high school or college. Then I realize it was 30 or so damn years ago.
I tell people that when you hit 30, you hear your music in a grocery store. When you hit 40, you hear it in an elevator. When you hit 50, you hear it back on the radio as kids re-discover it and find it cool.
There’s only 1 important thing to remember. The Music the kids rediscover and think is supercool isn’t the earworm crap that actually infested the airwaves when you were in high school. There will be a cool song you never heard and it will be from the year you graduated high school. A couple weeks later, you will convince yourself you had heard it in high school.
Me: *enters elevator*
“Dig through the ditches and burn through the witches
I slam in the back of my Dragula!
Dig through the ditches and burn through the witches
I slam in the back of my Dragula!”
Meh. I’ve heard “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood in a grocery store while looking through the produce. I did NOT get any fresh fruit that day. ewww.
The wild thing to think about is that Sunfire is as far away from us now as a ’66 GTO was then.
30-year-old cars were MUCH cooler in the 90’s, lol.
Sure, but if you live in Minnesota, this would ostensibly mean it could no longer legally be a daily driver.
Actually same in my state, but I’m not sure if that is enforced.
In Michigan it would be illegal to drive normally except between Memorial Day and Labor Day.
I think that all 25 year old Michigan plates should be made out of wood, so they can match the bumper they are screwed on.
This is such a silly piece of legislation, I hope rational heads prevail and it goes nowhere in the legislature.
Sounds to me like it’s just a money grab, they don’t have any restrictions on a car that’s registered normally…..for the extra yearly fees.
Lower fees for cars that are only occasionally used is the entire point of classic car registrations.
[This comment violated our community standards. – ED]
Please keep you gross hateful over-generalizations off here this is a automotive news site.
I don’t think this has anything to do with political party affiliation or even so called tree- huggers, I think they just want the money regular registrations bring in.
Yes, also people are all over “waste fraud and abuse” in Minnesota and then get mad if they go after people abusing the collector plate thing. I there there are better ways like make the age older and remove the daylight and day of week parts.
Anything else you’d like to divert to and complain about Karen?
sure lots. thanks.
Maryland also just changed their laws on this. It went from 25 years to cars from 1999 or older. The whole crux was to cut down on folks abusing classic plates on their 2001 Camry and push them to get the much more expensive regular registration. The classic tags also mean no inspection (which only happens at the time of purchase in MD) and no emissions. Classic registration is $50/yr vs standard registration being $120-$135/yr depending on weight. They’re enforcing the change when your registration comes up for renewal, so those 2001 Camrys are getting forced to regular plates.
IMO, these types of restrictions for daily use and hourly use are rarely, if ever enforceable.
Maryland made it so much worse by making it retroactive to 1999 and older when it was already 20 years old. My friend had a c5 since it was new, barely cracked 5000 miles a year on it, and put historic tags on it when it was convenient. Then he had to go get it inspected and re-registered for a good sum of money.
PA is attemping to get people to comply with this by forcing people to submit photos with each registration and making the decision take 6 weeks. It’s not quite as deterring as they think.
When you can measure normal registration in dollars per mile driven a year, it makes perfect sense to wait.
I live in MD and thankfully this was just reversed. It actually used to be that any car 20 years old or more could register as historic, then they changed it to a 1999 cutoff, and now that has been amended to any car 25 years old or older.
This is good news! Last I saw the bill stalled out, but I’m glad it did get traction to move forward.
Let the bidding commence…
“A stupid waste of time”, that pretty much sums up my time living in Minnesota.
Can confirm: Lived in Minneapolis area for 1.5 years. Some lovely people here and there, but for the most part, Minnesota is insanely passive aggressive and is the most racist place I’ve ever lived.
Minnesotans are just quiet Texans but they’ll get just as hyper defensive if you dare criticize the Great White North.
I have a family friend who had collector plates on all his “fun” cars. (From my recollection his fleet included: a late 70’s Trans Am, a Meyers Manx, an old Willy’s Jeep) I remember him telling me that he and some friends made business cards for their “car club”. They each had a set of the cards and each card in the set specified a different week day for “Club Meetings”. He said if he got pulled over and the officer hassled him about it being a collector car out on a weekday, he would produce the business card that listed that day as the club meeting day. I thought that was a clever workaround…
The primary reason I wanted collector plates on my Boxster is I am only required to run a rear plate. Front license plates look stupid! I do save about $50 a year compared to the registration I would pay for a vehicle that is otherwise over 10 years old, which isn’t nothing, but give me a break, and I only put about 1k miles on that car/year.
Also, when I requested the plates the dmv confirmed that I had a second vehicle as a daily driver, so the state still gets its fair share, I also have two motorcycles with regular plates. Our infrastructure is in bad shape so I am sure someone thinks this will help generate revenue to fix the roads but we are past that point, our lawmakers would have to take a good, hard look at the budget and reallocate funds to roads, or let them deteriorate. Everyone seems to have a truck anyway.
I’m trying to imagine some municipal cop or even state trooper trying to enforce this.
I get that there are loopholes that people abuse to keep operating costs low (the Montana LLC, for example), for supercars, which should be clamped down on.
But if your loophole is “Paying $50 less to drive an old hoopty,” like… I’m not gonna care that much? Somebody driving a 2001 Honda Civic is either not well-off and thus somebody I’m happy to cut a break to with regards to registration, or it’s a rich dude who’s still, ya know, doing the environmentally sensible thing and keeping old iron on the road. This whole bill seems like somebody saw a rich guy driving a 2001 Porsche on a Tuesday and got fired up about it, apparently not realizing there’s almost no meaningful amount of revenue that can be collected here and that most people who are “abusing” the system are actually doing the environmentally and fiscally sound thing.
I think the enforcement on plates is at the DMV, and in that case its a matrix of how old is the car… you get pioneer plates. Out on the road I always assumed since these are restricted use plates it was a way to hit people with extra fines if they do something wrong/are being an asshole.
Otherwise, you hit the nail on the head, the amount to be gained by this is just not worth it. Any car over 10 years old is only $50/year to register, and the state at least in my case confirmed that I had another vehicle as a daily before they would issue me the collector plates, but I suppose I could sell my daily and it would take a while before someone found out I was down to one car.
On a classic car, the regular plates are going to be somewhere around $50 per year, so I don’t see the point of getting the Collector plates. Once a vehicle is 10 years old, it is charged at the minimum rate which is (i think) $38 plus any wheelage tax (between $0 and $20 depending on the county) and like $1.75 “technology fee”
For me (Michigan) the difference is $868. $90/yr vs $32/ten years.
As someone who drives around MN, has had MN collector plates. I think the issue is that there are a rare set of people abusing the system. I think a better solution is not the weekend days but making the plates age requirement 30-35+ years old to avoid the rusty old P.O.S. 2000’s cars that people do not want to pay yearly for normal plates. Yes, in Minnesota, I daily drove a 1970 jeepster commando 1/2 of the 1990’s with collector plates and was never pulled over.
It is not car hating liberals it may be just giving police some regulations that they CAN deal with issues individually. I do not like the current wording as there are weekend in MN in winter that only have like 8 1/2 hrs of daylight.
Looks like the solution is to just put regular plates on your old collector car in Minnesota and say to hell with the jumping through the hoops the idiots in government want to put you through.
Maybe that’s the plan all along.
I’ll bet if you pull back the curtain, there is an insurance-funded group doing all of the work in the shadows.
I’m a bit of a pessimist and I see the case being that old cars are a problem for large corporations. Manufacturers don’t want the burden of having to keep making parts for older cars. Not a huge issue with stuff from the carburated era, but can you imagine being held to the same standard for cars made in the last 20 years? Cars that were meant to be disposable, tons of plastics, fragile computer parts, never even mind the software etc. Insurance companies don’t want old cars around, they like new stuff. Lots of built-in safety systems, automated emergency braking, fancy airbags, etc. Old cars with no ABS, traction control and even 30+ year old airbags are a liability.
I am of the mind that cars, like software, child seats and milk, will eventually come with an expiration date. To me, this is a toe in that water. I don’t know what’s going on in Minnesota, I thought that there was supposed to be a bit of a progressive nature to their politics. However, they put in that bullshit age restriction stuff so now your computer HAS to verify the age of the user so that Meta doesn’t have to (they pushed the legislation). Pushing more bullshit legal nonsense on people with ZERO real benefit to the voting public is the opposite of progressive.
I recall hearing someone once say, “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength” and then telling us that it works backward as well. I suppose that’s always been true as long as greedy people feel entitled to take what they want.
My buddy has a 1949 Jeep CJ with MN collector plates, One time registration fee and nearly nothing to insure, If he had regular plates the registration would be yearly and the insurance a lot more and he would probably sell it.
MN politics are such that 55-60% of the population lives in the twin cities metro region and the other 40-45% is very rural (12 people/ sq mi) and very very conservative.
That is exactly the core approach of both major parties in the US today.
It must be nice to live in an area that doesn’t get snow/ice. I can’t imagine a car lasting 25 years as a daily driver without major rebuilds.
25 years in MN is rather rusty. Something about the average of a 1/4 million tons of salt used every winter.
I don’t run collector plates on my cars but for one exception. My ’29 Chevy has a “year of manufacture” plate on it so I run a real 1929 Michigan plate on my car as the legal plate, mostly because it looks cool. There are some restrictions, similar to what’s listed above, but it’s a forever registration. I can only drive it to events, however, going to a cruise or getting ice cream at the drive-in would be “acceptable”, I just can’t use it to commute to work.
Conveniently, there are local shows on my way to work most days during the summer so if I want to drive it, I do and could claim I’m on my way to one of those. No one has ever cared though.
I run regular plates on the rest of the “classics” to avoid any B.S. It’s not worth the savings.
Yeah, this is the conclusion I came to when looking into it in my state. Though I do think Antique plates on an early 2000s Honda is so funny I might do it anyways.
Why don’t they just say “You can use the car for X number of days each year” and be done with it. What you do on those X number of days is up to you.
You get mailed a set of tamper proof scratch labels each year denoting those X number of days, and whenever you drive the car out you scratch out one label and put it on your dash.
Easy solution surely.
20years old is pretty light.
A better fix would be to restrict to 35 years old to qualify as “classic”.
That or mileage checks which is its own can of worms. But if you have something like Hagerty’s classic insurance, they already limit mileage as far as I know. I can’t say speak to how they verify it, but it’s at least a solution.
In Maine they had those rules on Antique Auto plates, which were for a car over 25 years old. The benefit was cheaper registration cost, but more importantly, it waived the dumb annual state inspection sticker. But then people started putting Antique plates on their old Volvo 240 and driving them daily. The State recently changed it to 35 year old or older. Bummer since we have a $400 winter beater Subaru from 1995 and it can’t get the antique plates and it’s not worth putting the money into to have it pass inspection.
In NC we have a blanket inspection exemption for all cars more than 35 years old. Antique auto plates drop that to 30 years, but you can only use the car for club use, parades, exhibitions, and occasional ‘other’ usage. The big one is it drops the value of the car to $500 for property tax purposes.
I think PA is similar, though ANY car over 25 is emmisions exempted.