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Comment by chrismeller | Hacker News Reader

When you mentioned pickups I immediately pictured bent and mangled plates from hitching up trailers. Not being from any sort of region that would have snow banks, let alone ones tall enough to get to the bumper of a truck... why is that bending license plates?

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>why is that bending license plates?

The plastic bracket doesn't usually support the bottom half and the result is a license plate that's formed to perfectly follow the contour of the bumper (for stuff that still uses a steel bumper) or just bent into the empty space of the lower grill opening (on many cars)[1]. Then there's all the work vans that just have the license plate affixed wherever on the front bumper the owner felt like drilling two holes.

[1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/2000_Sub...

Often to get off the road, people pull up and drive right into the snow bank. After it's been plowed and it settles, it can get quite hard.

Wouldn’t that harm the bumper the plate is on at some point? I mean if it’s hard enough to bend the plate it seems the same as me just bumping into the concrete wall in front of my parking space every day when I get home and I would never do that and think it’s ok...

Eventually, maybe, depends how hard you hit stuff and the bumper in question. Depending on the vehicle age and owner there might just not be any fucks around to give (with work vehicles being driven by people making less than $20/hr this is almost guaranteed). Snow doesn't tend to be very damaging because you can't really build a straight up wall with it and the outer layers generally conform to the bumper so it's more like a soft push on all the available surface area. It's just that if the license plate doesn't have anything substantial backing it up it will bend.

There's also a significant materials difference between a bumper (either plastic or metal) and the thin piece of metal a license plate is made out of.

I would imagine there's probably some mental disconnect about how damaging ice could be because "hey, it's just frozen water, it's not like it's concrete or something"

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