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Get rid of that ugly plastic box and hide those unsightly bumper holes.

Few experiences are more painful than having a dealership take a power drill to the front of your shiny new car to install a license plate bracket—it’s the car enthusiast's equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. Thankfully, I bought my Volkswagen GTI certified pre-owned and didn’t have to witness the heinous act. However, now that I’m a resident of Pennsylvania, I’m not legally required to run a front license plate.

Great news, but what do I do with the holes in my front bumper? There are many solutions to this problem, and BumperPlugs looked appealing enough for me to pull the trigger. See below for a detailed look at how I installed the plugs, along with other factors to look out for.

You might be surprised to know that 20 of the 50 United States don’t require you to run a front license plate—including Pennsylvania, where I’m currently located. Check the bulleted list below to see if you’re good to pull off that plate.

It’s not rocket science that you’ll want bumper plugs that match the factory color of your vehicle. One of the biggest gripes I see with BumperPlugs is that they’re too expensive—a fair argument given that a set of two costs $29.95. However, it’s true when they say you get what you pay for: The extra cost covers the work that has gone into precisely color-matching your paint job.

Each plug is painted using the same 22-stage—19 stages plus 3 stages of clear—paint process that can take up to 14 days to get right. That’s not to mention that BumperPlugs also uses high-quality paint from Germany to mix the exact formulation that would have been used from the factory. You can see in the above photos that the carbon steel gray is a perfect match with the paint finish on my Mk7 Volkswagen GTI.

Taking the standard bracket off the vehicle proved to be pretty difficult. It’s held onto the vehicle using plastic rivets that sit flush with the license plate bracket itself. After prying and poking at them didn’t prove successful, it was time to break out the power drill. We ended up drilling a shallow pocket hole into each rivet and driving a screw into the hole just enough to grab onto it with a set of pliers.

Ideally, you’d want to give your car a good wash before installing bumper plugs—or before doing anything cosmetic, for that matter. However, we ended up using Simple Green and some shop towels to blast through some of the existing grime.

Once the plate carrier had been removed, the area underneath was about as filthy as I expected. Having bought the car pre-owned in 2016, there’s been more than six years of road debris and detritus trapped behind it. After wiping all of that away, I noticed that the edge of the plate cover had scuffed the paint—see above photo. I couldn’t fix this at the time of installation, but it’s nothing that a little polish can’t smooth out.

BumperPlugs advertised that the threads have a 9⁄32-inch root diameter—this means that the shaft of the plug is 9⁄32-inch with threads that extend very slightly past that. However, they took some persuading to get into the bumper: After reaming out the existing holes, we used a dead blow hammer to very carefully tap the plugs flush with the edge of the bumper.

While there were three plastic rivets holding the bracket onto the bumper, we found two extra holes from the screws holding the license plate—definitely account for these additional holes when ordering the number of plugs. After drilling out the extra holes and reaming them, the extra two plugs tapped in just fine.

As you can see, the plugs really clean up the front of the car. Darker colors—especially the carbon steel gray on my GTI—hide the shadows of the plugs better than brighter and lighter shades. Either way, they’re a subtle option for hiding the holes after you’ve deleted your front license plate.

Matt Crisara is a native Austinite who has an unbridled passion for cars and motorsports, both foreign and domestic, and as the Autos Editor for Popular Mechanics, he writes the majority of automotive coverage across digital and print. He was previously a contributing writer for Motor1 following internships at Circuit Of The Americas F1 Track and Speed City, an Austin radio broadcaster focused on the world of motor racing. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona School of Journalism, where he raced mountain bikes with the University Club Team. When he isn’t working, he enjoys sim-racing, FPV drones, and the great outdoors. 

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