Ryan Yearsley in front of his Toyota Yaris (Photo by Jay Paul)
“What’s the story behind your plate?”
It’s the question you want to ask of the driver ahead of you while stuck in traffic on the interstate or the person sitting in the parked car with the indecipherable letters and numbers on their bumper. However it struck you, the curiosity of vanity plates is a universal feeling. Not long after Ryan Yearsley moved from his native Delaware to Richmond in 2023, he took these conversation pieces from the street to the screen, launching the Instagram account PL8HNTR.
As the Plate Hunter, Yearsley records short video interviews with car owners in the Richmond region to learn how they came up with their personalized plates. “The stories are just very diverse,” he says. “Some of them have so much meaning, some of them are inside jokes, some of them are just, ‘I couldn’t believe this was available.’”
“LIAR,” “MOO CAR” and “MR VAN” are all examples of recent profiles. In the early days of the account, Yearsley found his sources in person, sometimes waiting by the car until the owner showed up. “I realized that this was not going to work long term,” Yearsley says. He switched to leaving business cards on windshields, which helped the account pick up steam for a few months. Now at nearly 8,000 followers as of press time and some 60 plates featured, Yearsley says the majority of profiled cars have come from his Instagram followers.
Richmond is a uniquely good city for his project, Yearsley notes, thanks to Virginia’s low cost for vanity plates — an additional $10 per year, the cheapest in the country — which makes it the U.S. state with the most vanity plates per capita according to multiple sources. Virginians love their vanity plates so much, in fact, that a court case championed by the ACLU of Virginia this year argued that the DMV’s recall of a personalized plate because of its anti-police message violated the First Amendment. But it’s more than the volume of vanity plates that stands out to Yearsley.
“It comes down to how friendly everyone is down here, too. Like, I can actually coax people into doing interviews,” he says. “I have an inkling that a channel like this, I don’t think it would really work many other places.”
Yearsley, who has two personal plates, “SKIDMRX” (a reference to his online gaming username) and the newly acquired “PL8-HNTR,” is just getting the hang of capturing the curiosity around vanity plates and building community along the way. “I’m launching plate hunter stickers and keeping up with everyone who’s into this online,” he says. “I’m not trying to go crazy — just trying to keep it fun.”
Plate Peeping
THE 90S: The plate of a 1995 Mitsubishi 3000GT, what the owner called “a very ’90s car”
B1OOM: A reference to wildflowers and the owner’s last name, Bloom
PSNFRT: Shorthand for the car’s unique paint color, “passion fruit”
MEYADA: “Not much of a story, it’s just a fun way to say Miata,” per the owner.
