Personalizing your Tesla’s digital twin has gotten a lot more fun over the last couple of years. Beyond changing your vehicle color or applying a custom wrap, Tesla lets you display a personalized license plate on your vehicle visualizations.
Whether you want to match your real-world vanity plate, add a custom flag, or show off a fun novelty background, configuring your plate design is quick and straightforward once you know where to look.
What It Is
The custom license plate feature lets you customize the virtual license plate rendered on your vehicle avatar on the central touchscreen, in the Tesla app, and more. Support for bespoke license plates debuted alongside custom digital wraps in the 2024 Holiday Update, but these options were limited to the Cybertruck at launch.
Not a Tesla App
Fortunately, Tesla confirmed at the time that they would eventually make their way to other models as well. Both features expanded across the fleet a year later with the 2025 Holiday Update. Now, owners can dial in their plate background, text, and font colors to make their digital car match their real one.
Supported Models
The feature is supported on all Tesla models equipped with Intel Atom or AMD Ryzen infotainment processors. Whether you drive a Model 3, Model Y, Model S, Model X, or Cybertruck, as long as your vehicle runs modern software, you can access the Paint Shop tool where the magic happens.
How to Customize Your License Plate Visualization
Unfortunately, you can’t currently customize your license plate visualization in the Tesla app on your phone — only on your vehicle’s touchscreen. To customize your plate from the driver’s seat:
Open Toybox.
Select Paint Shop and tap on Customize.
Switch over to the License Plate tab at the top.
Choose between the Number and Background sub-tabs.
Not a Tesla App
Under the Number tab, you can enter any custom text string up to 32 characters long using letters and numbers. You can also use the color wheel to select your desired text shade. Under the Background tab, Tesla includes a few default holiday and thematic background graphics, or you can opt for a solid color fill. If you want a truly unique design, you can also upload a custom image to use as the background — more on that below.
How to Create a Custom License Plate Background
Creating your own license plate background allows you to match a custom wrap design, display regional flag emblems, or draft unique graphics.
All you need to do is design a custom image file on a computer. You can use even the most basic of image editors, but keep these technical specifications in mind:
Regional Dimensions: Use a resolution of 420×200 pixels for North American standard plates or 420×100 pixels for longer European-style plates.
Text Options: You can bake your plate number or custom plate text directly into the background image while creating it if you want unique fonts or more text customization than what Tesla’s Paint Shop offers. If you do this, simply leave the license plate text field blank inside the car’s Paint Shop menu.
File Requirements: The image file must be saved in PNG format and under 500 KB.
You can store up to 10 custom plate background images on your vehicle at a time.
How to Upload Custom License Plate Images to Your Vehicle
Once you have your custom license plate background ready as a PNG file, transferring it to your Tesla takes just a couple of minutes:
Unplug the USB flash drive located inside your vehicle glovebox and connect it to your computer.
Open the USB drive directory and create a new folder named LicensePlate (case-sensitive, with no spaces).
Copy your custom PNG image file(s) into the LicensePlate folder.
Safely eject the drive, head back to your vehicle, and plug the USB drive back into the glovebox USB port.
Not a Tesla App
When you open the License Plate tab in Paint Shop and select Background, the new image(s) will automatically appear alongside the factory default templates.
While Tesla recently added the ability to upload custom wraps to your vehicle directly from your phone through the Tesla app, license plate backgrounds can’t be uploaded wirelessly just yet. Expanding this functionality to custom license plates would be a natural progression and could already be on the roadmap, but for now, you’ll need to lug around custom images on storage drives.
Where Custom Plates Show Up
Once applied, your custom license plate renders across several aspects of your Tesla user experience. You’ll see your personalized plate on the main driving visualization on the central touchscreen, inside vehicle status menus, and on the 3D car model displayed in the Tesla mobile app.
Custom license plates are a neat touch that makes your vehicle avatar feel unique while also serving as an easy way to memorize your real plate number when parking.