How did Steve Jobs get away with not having a California (or any other U.S. state’s) license plate on his Mercedes SL55 AMG?
“Steve (or someone close to him) spotted a loophole in the California vehicle laws,” David Heath reports for iTWire. “Anyone with a brand new car had a maximum of six months to affix the issued number plate to the vehicle.”
Heath reports, “So Jobs made an arrangement with the leasing company; he would always change cars during the sixth month of the lease, exchanging one silver Mercedes SL55 AMG for another identical one. At no time would he ever be in a car as old as six months; and thus there was no legal requirement to have the number plates fitted.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Mystery solved!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Sarah” for the heads up.]
Where did he keep getting brand new silver 2007 MB SL55 AMGs? You’d think the supply would eventually evaporate.
When you have SJ kind of money, that isn’t an issue 😉
Why not recycle them? Just keep the same two cars and rotate them as “new” every 6 months.
Because switching new cars to avoid plates is a legal loophole. Tampering with the odometer is outright illegal.
That may be the dumbest thing I’ve ever read.
Again, the name fits…
Moron
That sounds terribly wasteful and burdensome for such a small benefit.
It’s not wasteful at all. All leased cars are eventually returned and sold to someone else.
This begs the question, did he ever even apply for a license?
Sorry. That does not “beg the question”. Look up the phrase. Misusing a phrase like this makes you look as if you are uneducated. I’m sure it was an oversight.
Eh, (question) beggars can’t be choosers….
Picking at phrases like this make you look silly. Especially when you don’t even correct the usage.
Knowing the strict philosophical sense of the phrase does not make you seem clever, nor can such a phrase have only one meaning.
I believe this as much or less than the Wozniak explanation.
I love it, he was a genius.
This sounds like something Steve Jobs would do. He didn’t want license plates on his car (for whatever reason) and he found a legal and clever way to avoid it.
HOWEVER, his “user experience” was basically having a brand new car all the time. I suspect that THAT was the real reason for doing this six-month lease thing in the first place. He wanted his personal car to be less than six months old all the time, to always have that “new car” feel. This license plate “loophole” was discovered later as a convenience to avoid receiving and affixing new plates every six months, NOT because the actual goal was to not have plates. And that’s all there was too it…
And how is it wasteful?
That specific car has a huge resale value, more cars made = more jobs. Feeding the economy…nothing was lost or wasted they were simply released or resold, not discarded …… If you had that type of influence and resources what seemingly eccentric things would you do………
I agree that it has a positive effect on the economy, but from the personal perspective it is wasteful in the sense that he had to pay for a brand new lease every six months, for a purely lustful return. I agree that money was no issue for him and that this was pocket change, but it goes against Buddhist teachings to spend ones fortune on senseless things like this. I’m not bashing him, as I’m a huge fan. It just comes as a surprise that he would spend so much for an insignificant return, based on the principles he is claimed to have held dear.
Any relegious beliefs are to be used as a guide, not an absoulte unyeilding path, else we would all be monks. The absolute, to the letter following of any religous path would be considered adherance to dogma… Something he could not condone. It could be argued that although he was Buddhist he, like most of us, had his beliefs tempered by his environment. That environment for him was a much different one than the one that we live in. He was not a man who coveted excess, quality…., imagination and craftsmanship yes…. extravagance and excess no. This was merely, for him, an economically viable way to simplify a detail he thought important. And if we have learned anything about him, details are important.
If you’re the leasing company, do you think you’d even be taking a hit on depreciation if you’re re-leasing a 6 month old AMG Mercedes? Probably not.
If you told the next buyer it belonged to Steve Jobs?
I think you’d come out ahead.
We may just start seeing a number of these cars show up on eBay : )
You are a huge fan but still fail to realize he had a little “beat the system”/”prankster” (theres probably a better word for that….mischievous….that’s the word) streak in him. From the blue box, the TV Antennae Jamming gizmo all the way to no license plates. That’s what made the man. Genius.
Buddhism is not that streamlined as it may seem; and it has many variants. In some cases certain “mystic” requirements might prevail over pragmatism. The more so changing cars has nothing to do with gaining anything material.
How did he do this on a $1/year salary?
master cylinder
Did anyone check to see if any Apple office supplies were missing? Maybe he resold enough of them to pay of the car like others do in offices around the country.
See, now that’s funny!
He had Disney-Pixar! for cars and coffee needs!
Well, he was also paid (rather handsomely) in stock options. Don’t know if he ever exercised them. But let’s not forget he made some $3 Billion from the sale of Pixar to Disney. That would cover the cost (or lease) of a lot of sports cars.
It was Steve’s world. We just lived in it.
You realize, I’m sure, that His Steveness had many other financial interests as well as sources of income other than Apple, Inc. to support his rather modest lifestyle for a billionaire.
That’s what I thought at first too, but that doesn’t make sense since he wasn’t always driving a new car. His last car was a 2007 model.
As a side note, I guess it doesn’t matter to reveal this now, but he used to take it to the car wash himself. I saw him there once and a co-worker saw him another time. It’s Lorenzo’s Car Wash on El Camino in Mountain View. If you live in the area, I highly recommend this car wash. Free popcorn, lemonade and coffee, plus they’re environmentally friendly and do other good stuff.
Lozano’s Car Wash
Ya, Lozano’s that’s it. Damn auto-correct 😉
Brilliant
Yeah but Steve missed out on “Personalized License Plates”!
Anyone here think of what Steve’s vanity plates would say?…
I’ll give it a try… (my state allows 7 letters max so it’s what I’m going with but I won’t hold it to yours)
INFN8LUP (Infinite Loop)
Okay, sucks, but what’s yours?
Oops 8 letters… guess I won’t hold 7 letters to me either! : )
That’s a loophole?
19 states do not require a license plate on the front of a registered vehicle. Is your state one of them? If not, maybe you should contact your governor or local representative.