Any British Folks Here?

I was watcihing a rerun of Fifth Gear on Speed Channel and they had a segment on liscense plates that went on car. It looked like people bought and sold tags like you would a deed to a house or stock. Some tags were fetching higher prices then others because of the letters and numbers on them. The tag system isnt like that here in the US, can anyone explain to me how that works, and why some were really expensive and some werent? Also, how could a tag hide how old a car was? or was I misinterpreting what he said?

When you buy a car in the UK, it gets registered with the DVLA - Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency. The standard license plate you receive is made up as follows:

XX-00-XXX

The first two letters represent the area and the particular DVLA office the car was registered in, so living in London i see a lot of license plates starting with "LN".

Then you get two numbers, which represent the year the car was registered in. If a car was registered in the first half of 2004, it gets a "04", if it's registered in late 2004 it gets a "54".

The final three letters are random.

As you can imagine the odds of getting a license plate that says something cool with all these random letters in it is pretty slim, most people couldn't care, but for those that do the DVLA will happily sell you a personalised plate. These range from things like:

CJM 5678 - for a guy whose initials are CJM - these types of plates are pretty cheap (~$500).

More expensive license plates are shorter (A1 is the first ever british license plate and therefore worth a fortune), or something that is, or looks like a word, e.g. B4D455, with the 4's looking like A's and the 5's looking like S's. You also get license plates like "WOW M5" on BMW M5's, or 360 XXX on a Ferrari Modena, etc...

To give you an idea of how much these things go for, i remember a while back, The Boss, Bruce Springsteen was interested in buying a private plate that read "BOSS". The price? £250,000.

Will that's rather confusing.


Victor Mildrew of all people managed to get one that read "P 155 OLE" Of course that was under the old regime of number plates in Britain.


Besides, I think his Nissan Almera was a little new to have P Plates. :p

Yeah, in the old days, they started with

XXX-000-X

with 3 random letters, 3 random numbers, and finally a letter representing the year the car was registered. When they got to the end of the alphabet, they changed to:

X-000-XXX

with the first letter representing the year the car was registered.

But the new system is weird, ill give you that.

Man that sucks, we get seven characters of our choice on our plates however we want. Mine is JJJ1985, kind of unoriginal but we get some pretty creative ones as you can imagine. And it only costs $75 in Illinois.

Man that sucks, we get seven characters of our choice on our plates however we want. Mine is JJJ1985, kind of unoriginal but we get some pretty creative ones as you can imagine. And it only costs $75 in Illinois.
That's awesome, and so cheap!!!

holy crap! 75...500.... damn I only paid 35 for plates and like 14 for registration in NY. the registration is good for about 2 years then you have to pay the 14 again but the plates are a one time deal until you either turn them in or the state issues a new style.




edit: actually come to think of it I think registration may be 40... I think I only paid 14 because I was transfering my plates from another vehicle the last time I did it.

www.plates.co.nz

Holy shit, talk about getting bent over on the prices in Europe, and i always thought i had it bad paying $75 a year.

Yeah, in the old days, they started with

XXX-000-X

with 3 random letters, 3 random numbers, and finally a letter representing the year the car was registered. When they got to the end of the alphabet, they changed to:

X-000-XXX

with the first letter representing the year the car was registered.

But the new system is weird, ill give you that.

Actualy the "3 random letters" were not random, they represented where the car was registered.
My perfect plate came up a few years ago now, my name being Nial - N 1 ALS came up for sale at £8995 ($13.000) was about to invest but someone beat me to it. Good job realy as the car I had at the time was not worth alot more.

CAT 1 was recently sold for £50k. A5TON was £35k to a guy with a V8 Vantage.

Some of them fetch amazing ammounts of money. If you can get it to say a name or word, they cost a tonne. Eg, James = JAM3S, Carol = C4 ROL, Katey = K4TEY or SL55 AMG, ML55AMG, CL55 AMG, (late 2005 plates) X5 BMW, etc etc.

you can be quite creative with them.

Holy shit, talk about getting bent over on the prices in Europe, and i always thought i had it bad paying $75 a year.

You can say that again, on a slightly different matter when we buy brand new cars in Ireland we first pay VAT on the car which is 21% plus on top of that we pay Viechle Registration Tax (VRT) which is about the same % again. People have been campaigning for years to get rid of VRT in Ireland or at least lowering it. Of course the government makes a fortune from it so they are unlike to do anything about it.

England seems to have followed us with our License plates. I cant remember when it came in here but our license plates are
XX - AA - XXXXX

The first two XX's being the year it was registered, the the letters being the County it was registered in and the final numbers being sequential numbers for the car that you are registering. For example 04 - D - 1 would be the first car registered in Dublin in 2004 (Normally the Lord Mayors car).

Pretty simple Reg's but we did encounter a problem a couple of years ago. The number of new cars being registered in Dublin alone was reaching the 100,000 mark and the question arose how would they fit the 100000 on the plate because they couldnt make the letters smaller so they had to make the actual plates bigger.

Plates here are $550 NZ. Fucking rip. :(

6 characters, anything you want as long as it's not offensive.