Update on California personalized license plate delivery times.

I have seen various posts about long wait times for personalized license plates, and wanted to share my own experience here in California. I placed an order on line September 14, 2020 and paid with a credit card, and it was shown in the DMV system as accepted on September 15 and processed on September 16. There were no problems or complications causing any delay. I called in at the end of December 2020 for an update, and was told that normal handling times were much longer than the 4-6 weeks listed on the DMV website. I called again in mid-April 2021 and was told that the order had already shipped and that maybe I would even receive them the next day. By this time, the new plates had been assigned to my car in early March and the ones still on it were no longer valid, even though the replacements had yet to arrive. I called again in early May and was told that if they did not arrive soon, then they were lost and that I should start over again. They did arrive on May 14 with an invoice inside and a USPS tracking number, which I checked on line. A nice DMV lady on the phone did confirm that personalized plates are still made in California by incarcerated people, who presumably have nothing else to do with their days and the 6 month production time seems strange to me. Stranger than that was the invoice inside the package that told me that the plates sat for 2 MONTHS on the shipping desk to make the trip in the mail to Santa Cruz, about 2.5 HOURS away. Actual time with the post office was 60 hours. Total time from order to receipt was exactly 8 MONTHS to the day. In the grander scheme of things, personalized plates for one of my collector cars is not a very big priority, but the general lack of ability of our government to accomplish even a simple task in a reasonable time is cause for concern. I do enjoy my time in old and new sports cars to take my mind off of such things.