I've been stopped numerous times at night. In most cases, I suspect it had to do more with the kind of car I drive (my Bug) than the purported reason for the stop. (We used to call an old car, a car with student stickers, or one with military stickers (in certain jurisdictions) a "probable-cause" car, i.e., a target for a pretextual stop.)
The majority of the stops had to do with the license plate light. In my Bug, I didn't have much of an excuse, but avoided a ticket anyway. But one license-light stop was suspicious; I was driving spouse's old Lexus ES300, which has two license lights, only one of which was out. (I don't think the cop could have had any trouble reading the plate number with the light from one bulb.)
On another occasion I was driving the Bug (broad daylight) on US 29 between Charlottesville, VA, and Washington. US 29 is four lanes, with a grass median that's generally 50 yards wide (often wider), and I was stopped by a state trooper. Trooper claimed that he had been going the opposite direction and thought he saw an expired state inspection sticker on my windshield by reading a two-inch number from a distance >50 yards slant-range, deflection angle increasing, all at a converging speed of ~120mph! If he did see it, his eyesight would have been better than that of legendary baseball player Ted Williams, who allegedly could see the threads of a rotating baseball traveling at 90+ mph.
Another likely pretextual stop: I'm in my Bug on a blustery night, same road, and I'm stopped by a county police. I furnish license and registration, and he says that I was weaving. I ask him if he'd ever driven a Bug in a gusting crosswind, and he goes back to his cruiser and drives away. There was serious wind that night, for my Bug has heavy front torsion bar, a steel-bar camber compensator bar on the rear, and gas-filled Bilstein shocks, and even it was twitchy. It's quite similar to my R65—not fast, light in a wind, unexceptional stopping ability, but able to run a twisty road faster than I want to drive it.
