Steve Jobs was never the one for pretentious displays of wealth. He lived in a simple house in a residential neighbourhood of Palo Alto, had an open driveway and kids from neighbouring houses came up for trick-or-treat to his house every Halloween. He was a normal guy who changed the world with his genius.
All except for his car.
Jobs was infamous for his habit of parking in the handicapped parking lot and for driving a silver Mercedes SL55 AMG with a blank license plate. How could he do it? Did he just pay the fine every time he was caught? Was he granted a special leave by the California government to indulge himself? Surely, he didn’t change cars every few months just to go without a license plate, right?
Right?
Well, that’s exactly what he did, according to this report published by ITWire, which contacted a former senior security official at Apple, Jon Callas, about Jobs’ numberless numberplates:
“Steve (or someone close to him) spotted a loophole in the California vehicle laws. Anyone with a brand new car had a maximum of six months to affix the issued number plate to the vehicle.
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.”
ALSO READ: More sustainable energy could be produced with new hydronium-ion battery
Now that is something very unusual from the master of unusual, Steve Jobs.All that for a license plate!
As to why he went to all this effort in the first place, Walter Isaacson pointed out in his biography of the Apple co-founder that Steve Jobs may have wanted a numberless license plate to prevent himself from being tracked by his enthusiastic fans, but when asked in interviews after the book was launched, the author has not clarified this statement.