I was watching one of your British car shows yesterday morning on Speedchannel and saw an auction for license plates (Tags). I am ***uming these are current plates. The host kept talking about cover-ups and using them to hide the year of the car. How exactly does that work? From what they were saying, it sounded very confusing. I also thought it was weird that some plates only had 4 characters on them while others had 7 or 8. Please explain this. Thanks for helping out the ignorant yankee. Oh, yeah, I ran into some of your "mates" Wed. night. They were headed to a hooters to eat. I suggested a better place and told them "You don't go to Hooters to eat.". the British guy responded "We weren't going there eat!"
Ok here goes with an explaination.Our plates come with the car from new and stay with the car for it's whole life.The only exception to this is when the plate is a good one i.e pre reg or a good reg one. (1) pre reg is where we don't have a letter pre-fix or suffix to designate a cars year.suffixes came in with 1964 model year letter starting with A so a number from that year would read say tby 340a which would be random nubers and the year letter at the end.Later you have prefixes from 1984 i think with the year letter at the front.These days you have a number say 52 the 2 designating 02.Older pre reg have 3 numbers and 3 letters my old 59 motorcycle was 475 vmx older cars can have any number the most valued is A1 i think at around $100,000.All of these plates can be transfered to a person if the car has it's original plate. (2)now i hope this ain't too confusing but if the car has been re-registered the plate is non transferable.The transferable plates however can hide the age of the car by either having a pre reg plate 475 vmx or by putting a younger plate on the car or by having a personal touch to read something so you could make a 5 look like an s or one sold recently which read(A 816 fly) reading( a big fly)i hope this can go some way to explain our very complicated system.............Marq
i used to work in british and world superbike and steve parrish ex racer , team manager and truck racer used to have a registration on his car of PEN 1S when he bought a new car it got transfered to it our central car people dvla normaly dont sell on registrations which spell anything like this but this one got through the net
the trade in "interesting" numberplates is well lucrative and has become one of the must have things for people with nothing better to do. A basic plate, say with your initials and some numbers is a couple of hundred pounds (around $300) and then theres a fee to the govt for the transfer. The guy who has the plate FAB 1 has been offered over £100000 for it , he also has 1 FAB!!!! Personally I'rd rather spend the cash on the car!!!
My Dad used to work for Dunlop between the '60's & the '80's and he reckoned that the top dog there had the registration number 'A1' on his chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce.
The plate itself is registered to Dunlop. My mates dad is an ex-copper and he used to look up plates and see who owned them!
Thanks alot guys. I figured the reselling of plates was a big business over there when the host said that a plate was sold at a plate auction for something like 300 pounds and was listed on a resellers site for 9500 pounds. I don't care what country you live in, that's a helluva markup!
Since we're on the subject of british plates... On the current ones, why are there different colours of the plates front and back? Someone said that the reason was so that the british police would know what was front and rear of the car?
The Jalopy Journal
