In Photoshop, I opened the Altima photo and then adjusted its RGB channel levels by moving the middle (gamma) slider almost all the way to the right.
I did the same thing with a picture of a car whose license plate I had manually redacted by simply coloring over it. The results are shown in the attached picture:
In the upper left is the Altima; below it is what the license plate area looked like with the altered gamma. In the upper right is a car with a manually redacted license plate; below it is what it looks like with a similarly extreme gamma.
Bottom line, although the unaltered photo of the Altima seems to have a blank "white" license plate, it actually contains a lot more random-looking light information in the license plate area than is visible to the naked eye.
From this, I conclude that (1) the photo of the Altima was
not manually modified to obscure the license plate or else (2) someone used a pretty fancy technique to do so (i.e., a redaction technique that retains lighting information in a way that looks random, rather than some basic redaction or simple blurring technique).
I lean toward possibility (1), but either would be interesting given the apparent likelihood that much better images of the Altima may exist---