Cars are not rational. They never have been, and they never will be, at least I hope not. The day cars become really rational is the day that I make my attempt to take over the Washington Monument with a fleet of irrational cars, making it my Obelisk of Obstreperousness and issuing a series of more and more unhinged demands until the authorities lure me out with some manner of hoagie and capture me in a dog kennel or something.
But until then, we can rest assured that the World of Cars is one of powerful irrationality and glorious nonsense, with everyone driving cars with capabilities far beyond what they could ever use and loving every minute of it. And yet, even in this incredibly irrational world, the way that the British sorta-personalized number plate market works remains a towering monument to madness.
Are you familiar with how the UK personalized plate market works? Oh, it’s bonkers. And why it’s bonkers requires a bit of explanation about UK number plates.
“Number Plates” are what we in the US call “license plates” or “license tags” because like all things, the British just prefer words with “u”s in them. It’s not a bad term, as it’s pretty much what it says on the tin: a plate, with numbers on it. And those numbers have meanings. Here’s what current UK plate numbers (and letters, the digits of words) actually mean:
By the way, the name for the official UK number plate font is Charles Wright (there’s a newer version called Mandatory, too), and that seems to be named for the company used to stamp vehicle number plates.
Okay, that makes sense! In fact, I’d even say it’s rational. Really, really rational! So rational you’re probably wondering what the hell I’m going on about here. Well, the crucial element is that the UK does not offer personalized or vanity number plates, and yet some quirk or failing of the human mind means that people want them.
So what can a healthy, red-blooded Briton do to satiate their desire for a personalized license plate, the sort that we take for granted here in the US, where we just kick a few extra bucks to the DMV so we can let the world know that we’re DWN2CLWN or LV2WANK or whatever.
The UK will not let you just pick some series of letters and numbers for your own personalized plate. But, there is a loophole, of sorts: UK number plates exist independently of their cars, and can be transferred from one car to another. This means that a particular license plate can be held “on retention” by paying a fee to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA). Because this is possible, that means that particular license plates can be transferred from one car to another, and plates with “desirable” number and letter combinations can be “sold” for shockingly large amounts of money.
So, what makes some combinations of numbers and letters desirable? Well, earlier UK number plate formats had fewer letters and numbers, with some really old or specialized ones having very few letters and numbers indeed, allowing for a small number of two-digit plates, including one that was just “F1.”
As you can imagine, for many people, having a number plate that said “F1” would be really appealing, so much so that the person who currently owns that plate, Afzal Kahn, an automotive designer, spent over half a million pounds to buy the registration and turned down an offer of $12.5 million in 2018.
For a number plate. This is what I mean when I talk about this whole mess being irrational.
So, let’s say you have more pounds than sense and really, really want a vanity number plate for your Austin Allegro? How do you go about finding one? Well, there are brokers of number plates, companies that have big inventories of plates held on retention, and they have websites that let you enter what you want, and then they search for close matches.
Like, let’s say I want an AUTOPIAN plate. What can I find?
Those aren’t all that great, mostly just getting me the AUT part of the name, but I guess if I had a BMW M4 or M5 there’s some options there? I don’t, though. And look at the prices of these things: M4 AUT is £1,244! That’s like $1,600! I’ve bought multiple cars for less than that!
What if we try something easier, like, what if I want to get our Editor-In-Chaps David Tracy a personalized plate in case he ever moves to the UK and wants to register a rusty jeep? What can we find with his initials?
Holy crap, £4,196 for 100 DNT? Or £3,345 for DNT 812, which it pretty good, but may be too risqué for David unless I convince him that the 812 just means he ate, um, one slice of pizza, too.
Still, this is ridiculous, especially from an American perspective, where David could have a plate with his initials and some other crap for, like, $50/year or something.
But, again, the difficulty and expense are why personal number plates have become such A Thing in the UK. One of the biggest companies that does this, Regtransfers.co.uk, even has a freaking magazine about number plate registration transfers.
This is all stunning to me. Look at their cover models/plates, for example. Theo Paphitis, a wildly successful and wealthy retail magnate, wanted his name on a plate, and the closest he could get is TIHEO. Sure, that’s pretty close, but if someone made Theo a desk plaque and spelled his name Tiheo, I bet he’d politely ask for them to try again, and maybe might ask his valet to slap them around a little.
But in the UK number plate world? This is magazine-cover worthy!
Let’s consider some other number plates people may want:
Let’s think about some traditional, even stereotypical British number plate ideas. You know how we always like to talk about British people calling you “guv’nor” in that likely offensive stereotypical way? Well, if you want a “governor”-themed number plate, you’ll be dropping almost £100,000 for THE 60V!
Hell, what if you’re the king. What if King Charles wants a custom plate for his specially imported Trans Am? The best I could find he could get is HRH 2, at £125,000. That “2” is a real kick in the royal junk.
What if you want a James Bond-themed one? X007 YES is the best I saw, for £3,325. If you have a cool old Triumph TR7? The perfect TR7 plate exists, for way, way more than that car is worth at £105,000. And what if you want to celebrate the British breakfast delicacy of beans on toast? The best I could find was BEA 11S, for £4,695.
Honestly, it’s all kind of brilliant. By not offering vanity plates, they’ve managed to create a whole strange thriving industry, complete with its own magazine and trading market and speculators, and big, big money. It’s incredible and silly and wonderful all at once, and it makes me wonder what transplants from the UK to America think about our cheap and plentiful vanity plates.
They must think we’re fools.
IIRC, the Aston-driving owner of A5TON payed £100k for the plate.
Worth noting that blasphemous, rude or contentious plates aren’t allowed. Although Fiona Fullerton did have FU2.
Jason, can you please start reviewing Regtransfers Magazine?
This isn’t true or at least, the article concentrates on one thing without acknowledging the other. Yes there is a market for buying and selling plates that are on retention through reseller businesses like Reg Transfers but you can also purchase plates from the DVLA directly.
There is of course a massive library of plates that have never been issued and the DVLA sell them through their own personalised registrations site. Standard format plates (xx00 xxx or x000 xxx) can be purchased for as little as £250 with the caveat that standard format plates can’t be put on cars older than the plate implies and then they can also be the source of differently formatted plates too.
As well as just listing plates for fixed prices the DVLA also auctions anything they think is too ‘interesting’ in batches every couple of months.
Companies like Reg Transfers do buy from the public but they also just keep an eye on the DVLA listings and auctions for things they can resell at a profit – scalping them or just winning auctions so they can sit on them until ‘the right buyer’ comes along.
My Volvo V60’s plate is one of those £250 standard format plates – being xx02 VVV. It’s original plate did have it’s own little quirk though, the years aren’t the years directly, they swap in March and September leaving a three month window between January and March where people typically avoid buying new cars to not have a car that appears to be from the year before however my V60 is a Japanese import originally sold in January 2012 so when it came to the UK through a Newcastle based importer it got a plate starting NJ61.
LR 1 is owned by Land Rover and resides on the CEO’s (whoever it is this week) company Range Rover.
Also “Afzal Kahn, an automotive designer“. That’s a fucking laugh.
Haha!
Oof, burn!
JCB has JCB 1 thru about 200. Lord Bamford keeps 1-10 for himself with the rest on company cars. When I worked there as a designer many years ago, JCB 1 was on his Porsche 959 daily driver…
The way that the Bamfords got 1-10 was quite amusing.
A local motorbike shop had them displayed on scooters. JCB wanted them but the shop owner wouldn’t sell the plates. He would, however, sell 10 scooters with the number plates attached…
My dad did something similar. Back before they were worth actual money a local guy wouldn’t sell him a plate with his initials and 2 numbers. So he bought the POS mini it was on, which then sat rotting away in our driveway for about 10 years.
Years ago, the only way to transfer plates between owners was to transfer the plate to a cheap vehicle and then sell the vehicle.
Brit here.
Today I passed a Range Rover with the number plate B 168 OSS (this is the old format, from 1983 to 2001, where the first letter indicates the year)
You can validate that I am telling the truth, by inputting B 168 OSS into this DVLA website : https://www.gov.uk/get-vehicle-information-from-dvla
The letters on the plate were (illegally) spaced to say “BIG BOSS”
With the new format of plate, as described by Jason, we see a lot of BO 55 XXX to spell out “Boss something”
When you input that plate into the DVLA website I bet it kept you waiting, huh?
Curious — is crappy DMV service a worldwide phenomenon? Maybe we’re not so different after all . . .
Yes but that wasn’t the joke.
When you take into account the fact that Northern Ireland is still using a variation of the pre-1963 system, with no year indicator but a limited selection of second and third letter combinations (all with either an I or a Z), and that NI numbers can be retained and transferred to any UK car, there is another “BIG BOSS” registration out there somewhere: BIG 8055.
NI plates used to be valuable (maybe still are) to owners in GB because they didn’t show the age of the car.
My parents bought a car from a police officer during The Troubles, they included a form to transfer the plate before someone slipped explosives under it at night. But Dad held onto it to sell to someone in England I make a few quid back. First Mum knew about it was when the army blocked her car in at a checkpoint and started demanding to know where the sergeant was and why she had his car.
In Australia, NSW number plate 69 just went in an online auction for AU$1.25m… It is the 69th number plate ever issues in NSW, which does help a bit, but it’s obviously more due to the actual number. They are genuine investment pieces now…
Can confirm, rare plates like this have been a very expensive thing in Australia for a long time now. People still put personalised plates on their cars even though a while back they went from owning them to renting them and they are $130-$500 per year.
I have a set of basic personalised plates that my parents got me when I turned 18. They are my plates, but if they come off a car for an extended period of time I have to pay storage for them. Otherwise if they go back into circulation I would have to pay rental.
Depends on the state, over here in Wait Awhile (Western Australia, for those at the back), it is a one-off fee for the personalised plate with no additional costs after the initial purchase. Registration fees stay the same. That said, technically speaking, you don’t OWN the plate, it remains the property of the state, you’re basically paying for the privilege of sticking it onto your car.
They have been creeping up in price though over the last few years. from $585 at the start of the year to $620 now.
So it’s like Delaware!
My all time favorite vanity plate was on a 1950 Ford Panel truck in California 50 years ago; “PU55Y”. I verified it was legit at the time with correct embossing.
J4SON is apparently attached to a 1994 Renault Clio Williams. Great car, but the plate is likely worth an order of magnitude more than the vehicle.
I fail to understand. If you want to announce something that much, you can get any bumper sticker custom-printed for about $10
I totally agree, and I don’t think I know anyone with a personalised plate, but I guess the people who like them really like them.
Mostly when I see a car with a personalised plate I just think “probably an arsehole”, and from the standard of driving, I’m usually right.
replied to the wrong comment and can’t figure out how to delete it. Sorry!
It’s conspicuous consumption: Yes a bumper sticker saying “JASON” (or “J4SON”) performs the same function. But on a plate, in a country where it’s common knowledge such plates are rare and expensive) signals you have enough money that you can waste a crazy amount just to let people know how much money you have. It’s the slightly more socially acceptable version of using hundred dollar bills to light your cigar.
A question please is it true once you get an approved plate you have to/can have a custom plate created?
Once you have bought the registration number and had it assigned to the car you can get new plates made up, but they have to be in the standard format. That format is extremely strictly controlled so that the plates can be read by ANPR cameras easily, but it doesn’t stop mistakes from happening.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/18/motorist-fined-number-plate-t-shirt
It costs about £10 for a plate to be made, but you need to show them your V5 registration certificate and they have to put their company name and post code on the plate.
I had new plates made for my Lotus a few weeks ago because the old ones had a dealer logo on them, and were also huge.
It’s a small car, so I cut down the new plates (within the legal dimensions) so that the rear plate fits better and the front plate doesn’t block so much of the radiator intake. There are companies that do this for you, but it only takes a few minutes with a hacksaw and some sandpaper.
If you have the V5, you can get new plates made up all over the place (I had to get a new front plate after a pheasant decided to headbutt it).
However, there’s also places that sell ‘novelty’ plates, which look like official number plates, but they won’t ask for a V5, which is totally legal until you actually affix them to a car..
The real madness is in the way that, having got a registration that vaguely matches the word they are looking for, people will play around with the spacing and colour of the screw heads holding the plate to the car. That is how BEA 11S will become BEANS. And that will be an MOT (annual inspection) failure if it’s on the car like that on the date of the test.
Plus it’s a red flag to the police, it’s like begging to be pulled over.
In Waynesville NC last weekend I saw two newish VWs parked next to each other with different styles of NC plate but both with the number “1”. I am baffled.
In the UK I’ve seen several different battered white Ford Transit vans with the exact same registration plate. Sometimes I’ve even seen them in convoy.
The different style of NC plates have letters appended. If the one of the 1 plates was a Share the Road plate, the actual registration would be 1 SR, for instance.
We have had the option of plates with almost no restriction on text for a couple of decades. The code do cost over 1000€ for eight years plus the standard ~200€ for the physical plate(s). I might have seen maybe 10 over the years, and as I understand it, it is not so much the price, but cultural unwillingness to stand out.
Personally I do not care, the code is just like the national personal ID number, though I have spend some effort to keep the orignal plate on my first vehicle, which is now the oldest plate I have seen in a decade.
I solved this problem by asking the State of Washington to make a vanity plate with my Allegro’s original UK registration number on it:
https://live.staticflickr.com/509/31593679671_32b38ef8bc_c.jpg
I did the same for my UK-market Volvo 66 GL:
https://live.staticflickr.com/5699/23360716673_b61f0ef688_c.jpg
and my other UK-market cars. It was trickier for my KV Mini 1 with its French registration as this involved too many characters for a Washington plate. I eventually hit upon a way around this. Well, more “over” than “around” I suppose:
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49945378703_c4bf681a0a_w.jpg
Disappointingly, AL13GRO and A113GRO are theoretically possible but don’t seem to be in issue, let alone on Allegro’s.
I just checked and neither ALLEGRO nor, equivalently as far as Washington is concerned, ALLEGR0 is available here. The official reason given is that “Someone else already has this plate. OR It has been identified as inappropriate or offensive.” My guess is that it’s on someone’s Tiffin Allegro RV.
Here is a couple of things about US regulations (and Europe) I do not understand.
With the exception of UK and older french and possibly other plates, the plates belong to the issuer; the state. So if the vehicle is scrapped or exported, the plates are returned (for destruction) and the code not used for a time.
Yet I often see pictures of cars in the US with their previous plates still fitted.
How did this happen? And why is it legal in the US to show the license plate of another country?
Same question for the ‘nationality oval’?
AFAIK US is part to same international conventions on road traffic, as most of the world.
In Quebec, the plate can stay yours if it immediately goes from a car you sold to the one you bought. Think trade-ins. There may be a different rule for vanity plates, but that’s a recent thing here I gas no experience.
But, with vanity plates, if your car is stolen and not recovered within 2 weeks, the plate is cancelled and can never be re-ordered.
Regular plates can not be remade. If your plate is damaged, you simply get a new one.
My understanding is that the US is a signatory to the convention concerning oval international vehicle registration codes but that Canada, the US, and Mexico long ago agreed not to require ovals for each other’s vehicles, particularly as their plates have had the name of the state, province, district, territory, etc. as part of the design for many decades, making the oval redundant. This is in contrast to, for example, earlier European plates which did not explicitly indicate the issuing authority, the absence of which was a significant part of the motivation to add the ovals in the first place. Consequently, in practice, since the police here don’t have much reason to care about country code ovals, anything goes.
I’m less certain about the legality of displaying non-US plates on a US-registered car in addition to the US plate. I suspect this varies from state to state but, in practice, the police don’t care.
In states that only require rear plates, whatever you bolt on the front bumper is not a license plate.
Depending on how a car got into the U. S. it’s perfectly OK to drive around with international plates. For example Canadian snowbird plates are common out here in the winter. Make sure you have valid insurance though.
As for desplaying foreign plates and US ones, I think you are fine as long as the US plate is legally displayed, the extra plate is just a decoration at that point.
In the US if you want to keep your licence plate you just transfer it to another car for free or declare it “lost” and keep it for funzies.
I have a custom with plates that match the paint.
I have never taken them off, just titled the car and put my new plates under the seat.
I think a cop told me once to take care of the plates (they’re from a distant state).
On another car, I just left the plates under the seat.
Got stopped once, he ran up to the car, asked about plates.
I held them up and he was gone.
No one cares here about country stickers.
You can sit on the very edge of a pickup bed, not inside it, and not get stopped.
In California, I had to ride inside the cargo box of a sound truck due to safety enforcement, and may be why we drove through the mountains.
I’ve had to ride under a tarp in a pickup bed with a herd of dogs, for the same reason.
The dogs assumed I was there to play.
Bands often make fake country stickers promoting their group.
i have a UK “vanity plate” as I was given it one Christmas, and I’m fond of it. So, when I moved to Massachusetts for a coupe, of years I thought it would be fun to have the same plate in two countries. Sadly, Mass. RMV insists that numbers on a vanity plate have to be at the end and not in the middle, so that scuppered that idea.
I still got a vanity plate, though maybe more obscure, as I figured that for $80 it would be a cool, unique souvenir to bring home and hang on the wall.
I grew up in Hong Kong and it’s the same system there. The original license plates started at 1, 2,3, and so forth. All those early numbers were hot properties, in addition to the auspicious numbers like 38, 998, and so forth. The big difference is that Hong Kong is a pretty small place. So pretty much most people know which rich family owns 1, 2, 3, etc. And you would run into these cars every now and then. So occasionally we’d get cut off by like ‘6’, and the grown-ups in the car would be like ‘It’s that Fok a$$hole again. Why isn’t he dead yet?’
Custom plates are still really big in HK, but it seems that they aren’t so creative anymore 🙁 Sometimes you walk along Mong Kok and see “TESLA1” on a …… Tesla, or “B1GB0Y” or “LUVBB” on an Alphard or Hiace.
I’ve come across some YT video that has “TAX1” on a red cab.
Singapore has basically same system. They can regularly go for $100k. Typically they want at least $1500. I think uae goes the craziest with it they will drop several million on a low number plate.
Jesus that’s complicated. In Indiana I think it’s like $35 and you can pick whatever you want provided it’s not inappropriate. We also don’t require front plates.
I’ve got a Euro plate on the front of my Sportwagen (BATCONTRY, in homage to Hunter S. Thompson) which amused my coworker in Germany. He asked “what about speed cameras, don’t you need a real front plate for that?” I was like…yeah we don’t have those here, except for the rare construction zone. And I’ve only seen that once.
I sat next to a guy on a plane once who was looking at a magazine he’d brought with him from England and it had license plates listed for sale in the back. The most expensive one was RR1. He was explaining the market to me but that was more than 20 years ago. I guess they’re considered sort of an investment that can appreciate.
I knew the man who was selling it! He was a splendid chancher who made a staggering amount of money from vending machines. His name was Raymond Richardson, hence the plate. He was the the man who entered the world cup rally with a Rolls Royce silver shadow.
In México City we dont have any kind of personalized plates, they are consecutive digits and letters so you get what you get and are happy with it.
Then I saw that the eventual 666-XXX plate ended up on a (then) new 2011 black C63 (I have a photo). That guy was either somebody at the transit department, or bribed somebody there.
I think I remember Rob Walker telling a story about how his family got a car so early in the game that he still had one with one letter and one digit, which implies old money (if not nobility). He put it on his cheapest little car to confound the paparazzi.
Damn Roosevelt.
Does the graphic for the non-personalized explainer contain an old plate, or are UK plates still part of the EU, while remaining separate from the automobile on which they are mounted?
Good spot. The EU flag is no longer on our number plates, and they must now say UK instead of GB. Yet 75 is the current date code (1 Sept 2025 to 28 Feb 2026)
Pff, buying plates. Get on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ level and hold a lottery for low number plates.
Virginia, especially the old Richmond types, LOVE low digit license plates. Not uncommon to see an old Mercedes wagon with a two digit plate in the early 2000s, now it is probably a Lexus SUV.
Yes, another reason to celebrate July 4th just a little harder this year. I am a little too fond of my “TRKL3T” plate for my Ford Maverick.
I don’t blame you!