HOV Bracket
June 2023
What was it?
The Utah HOV Sticker Bracket was a small piece of laser cut aluminum that held the Utah Clean Fuel sticker so the sticker didn't have to go on your car. It slid in behind the rear license plate, was held in place by the two screws already holding the plate on, and stuck out just far enough to one side for the sticker to live on the bracket instead of on your paint. I designed it on an iPad, went through three or four versions of it on a 3D printer, and then had OSH Cut in Spanish Fork cut the final version out of aluminum. A few people asked me where I got it, and I ended up selling 37 of them for $45 each.
Why did I build it?
In 2022 I bought a Tesla Model Y, my first electric car. One of the perks of driving an EV in Utah was the Clean Fuel pass, which let you use the express lanes on I-15 by yourself without paying the toll (i.e. you got the carpool lane without the carpool). The catch was that the pass was a sticker, and UDOT was fairly particular about where it went: on the back of the car, somewhere inside a shaded area that covered almost the entire rear of the vehicle.
The official guidance on where the sticker goes. Notice that "not on the car" is not one of the shaded areas.
I had just spent a lot of money on a new car, and the idea of putting a permanent sticker on the paint (or on the rear windshield, which is what most people ended up doing) bothered me more than it probably should have. Stickers like this one are made to tear rather than peel so they can't be moved from one car to another, which also means that when you sell the car you are getting a hairdryer out and hoping for the best. I looked around for something that would hold the sticker without it touching the car, didn't find anything, and decided to make one myself.
What did it do?
It hid behind the license plate
The bracket was a flat plate with two holes in it that lined up with the side screws on a license plate. You took those two screws out, slid the bracket in between the license plate and the car's mount, and put the screws back in, so the bracket was sandwiched in place and the plate covered most of it. The part that stuck out to the side was where the sticker went. The whole install took a screwdriver and about five minutes, and when you sold the car the bracket (and the sticker with it) came off with the same two screws.
From a few feet away it looks like the sticker is on the car, which was exactly the idea.
Plastic first
I am a software engineer and not a mechanical one, so the first version was mostly a guess. I measured the screw holes on my own plate, drew the bracket up in Shapr3D on my iPad over a couple of nights one weekend, and printed it on my 3D printer. The first print didn't fit. I had the spacing between the holes wrong, so the bracket wouldn't sit behind the license plate, and once I fixed that the sticker area didn't line up with the plate the way I wanted it to (a sticker sitting a few degrees crooked next to a perfectly straight license plate is the kind of thing you can't stop seeing once you notice it). It took three or four prints before the holes lined up and the sticker sat square, and each one cost next to nothing, which is the only reason I was willing to be that picky.
The view from the side. The gap between the bracket and the paint is the entire product.
Then metal
Plastic was fine for figuring out the shape, but I didn't trust a 3D print to survive a Utah winter on the back of a car, let alone a car wash. Once I had a design I was happy with, I uploaded the file to OSH Cut, a laser cutting shop in Spanish Fork, and had them cut it out of aluminum. The final version was 0.063" 5052 H32 aluminum, which is a phrase I had never heard before this project and now say with total confidence. It was thick enough that it didn't flex and touch the paint, and thin enough that the plate still sat flat. The first order was two brackets, one for my car and one in case I had gotten something wrong.
Selling them
Once it was on my car I posted a picture of it in the local Tesla owners Facebook group, mostly because I was proud of it. People were interested immediately, and from there it spread by word of mouth. I ordered ten more from OSH Cut, and when those ran out I ordered sixty to get the bulk pricing. I put together a small website from a free Bootstrap template so I would have something to point people to, with photos, a FAQ, and a Buy Now button that scrolled you down to an embedded Google Form. There was no shopping cart and no payment processor; you filled out the form, I got an email, you paid me on Venmo, and then you either picked it up from my house or paid a little extra for me to drop it off.
A customer's matte black car. The bracket stands out a lot more on dark paint, which is either a feature or a bug depending on who you ask.
The FAQ on the site was made up of questions people actually asked me, more or less word for word. Will it scratch my paint? Will it survive a car wash? Will it work with a license plate frame? Can it be stolen? (Sure, but so can your license plate.) The one I did not see coming was custom sizes. A guy from the Facebook group liked the idea enough to take it a step further, and asked for a second bracket for the other side of his plate so he could support his daughter's soccer team without putting their sticker on his paint either.
The Clean Fuel bracket on the left and the soccer bracket on the right. I did not know this was a market.
What did I learn?
A 3D printer makes hardware feel a little more like software.
- The prints took almost no time and cost almost nothing, so finding out that the holes were in the wrong place was a minor annoyance instead of an expensive one.
- Every mistake I caught in plastic was a mistake I didn't pay OSH Cut to make in aluminum. By the time I ordered metal, the only thing left to find out was whether it would survive the weather.
The simplest storefront is a form.
- I didn't build a cart, accounts or a Stripe integration (which is a little funny considering what I do for a living). A Google Form, Venmo and my front porch handled every one of the 37 orders.
- The manual parts (answering the email, checking Venmo, handing someone a bracket in my driveway) never added up to enough time to be worth automating.
Marketing is easy when your customers are already in one place.
- With The Campus Market we launched and had zero users after the first week. Here, one Facebook post did more than everything we tried for TCM combined.
- The difference was not the post, it was the audience. A local group of Tesla owners is a room full of people who all just bought a car they care about, and who all just got the same sticker in the mail.
Bulk pricing is only a discount if you sell them all.
- Brackets cost me about $7 each on the order of sixty, which against a $45 price was a decent margin, and it was the reason I ordered that many.
- Every bracket I sold was a bracket I had already paid for. With KeepTrack or the Games, one more user costs me nothing; here, one fewer customer meant one more bracket in the garage.
- The whole business also only existed because of a state program, and I had no say in how long that program lasted.
How did it go?
I sold 37 brackets and brought in about $2,000 before the state announced it was shutting down the Clean Fuel program. Once the sticker stopped getting you into the express lane there was no reason to own a bracket to hold it, and the orders stopped about as quickly as they had started. Two plus ten plus sixty is seventy-two brackets, so if you do the math you can work out roughly how many are still sitting in a box in my garage.
My favorite customer photo. A Clean Fuel sticker, on an electric car, right next to a license plate that says LUV GAS.
Did I quit my job to sell license plate accessories? No. Did I sell out of the bulk order? Not even close. Did somebody put one on a Tesla with a plate that says LUV GAS? Yes, and I think about it more than I should. But I turned a weekend of drawing on an iPad into a real product that 37 people paid for, and for as long as the program lasted my car drove in the express lane with nothing stuck to the paint. That was the whole point.
