Florida driver bolts a flashlight near the car’s license plate. But is that legal?
You can bolt a banana to a wall and call it art. You can hang fake testicles from your trailer hitch. But you can’t bolt a flashlight to your car’s license plate and think that’s a legal way to light your digits.
That’s what one driver in Florida’s Lee County did. Another driver, Maria Morales, snapped a photo of the flashlight bolted to the Kia Optima when she saw the car tooling down the boulevard in front of her in Cape Coral recently. She shared the image with NBC2. And though the, well, ingenuity drew attention on social media, what that Kia driver did was illegal, Cape Coral police told the station.
Florida statute 316.221 says your license plate has to be clearly legible from a distance of 50 feet to the rear and illuminated with a white light that has to be wired into the car’s system so that whenever the headlamps or auxiliary driving lamps are lighted so will the license plate.
This is probably a good time to remind drivers of other laws regarding your license plate — because Miami.
The little yellow registration sticker you get every year if you’re compliant? That sticky thing goes in the top right corner of your license plate inside the plate’s handy indentation, the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles mandates.
You do not stick each year’s registration tag in each corner of the plate. That might please your design aesthetic but it won’t stop you from getting pulled over. Put it over the old one. If you’re afraid someone will peel it off and steal it, use a razor to make thin diagonal cuts into the sticker. That way no one will
Frames around your plate must not obscure the registration sticker — which has to clearly show year and month — or the license tag’s numbers or letters.
And if the light is burned out, it’s much less costly to have the bulb or unit replaced by a mechanic —about $10 to $100 depending on the repair needed — than it is to bolt a flashlight near the plate, stock it with batteries, and risk a non-moving violation charge on your record.
