Quick straw poll here - Now Britain has had "regional" registrations for a few years now (Anglia, Birmingham, Cymru, etc.), is it a better system? Is it better for us to know where the car in front/behind was registered; do you want other drivers to judge you by your apparent origin; or does it make no difference at all?
Spain (as well as Italy, and France from January 2008) changed to "generic" non-regional registrations years ago, and the traditional enmity between Spanish regions - rivalry bordering on psycopathic hatred between certain areas; drivers from the Basque Country routinely stopped by police patrols; incidents of vandalism after football matches, etc... - have all but disappeared.
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We've always had regional plates :-S haven't we? I know *AF is Cornwall somewhere, *PF is Guildford...
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Well I still think very much in the old money (pre 51 reg). Personally I believe that plates should be allocated to people rather than cars. i.e. when you change your car the plate stays with you - if only for the end of repeated threads on here about private/personal plates !
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Registrations go with the driver in Germany and in some Swiss cantons you can switch one set of (lockable) plates between, say, winter and summer cars and only have to pay one insurance premium.
But does our simplified system - whereby you know the car in front is from Scotland, Yorkshire, London, etc... make life better or worse?
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Maybe back in the day but with Internet car buying, and people moving around more, it's pretty much irrelevant now, I think.
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But with the new system you don't know where the car is from! SC isn't Scotland, NE isn't Newcastle and so on; there is no logic to the issue of the prefixes and if there was I couldn't waste my failing brain cells on learning them. To me the in front is the car in front and it might be a Toyota!
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This Wiki page en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_car_number_plate_ide...s claims to explain the current region/district identifiers. Not sure all of them add up - K for Kettering and Luton seems particularly contrived.
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We've always had regional plates :-S haven't we? I know *AF is Cornwall somewhere *PF is Guildford...
My own first car's reg of RPJ 753L betrayed it as originating in Guildford.
Until 1974 registration of vehicles was the responsibilty of the Local Government Counties and each had an allocation of one or two letter combinations. Yorkshire's West Riding had WW, WU and WR. U, UA, UB were Leeds (a county borough), Rochdale held DK. Our personal plate starts LOV - a relic of SWMBO's grandad's motor business in Brum.
Will miss relating the French registrations to the owners home departement.
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>But with the new system you don't know where the car is from!
No, but you know where it was registered. Gunther starts with RA, as that's one of our local registration centres. I don't think many people really pay that much attention though - the only other one I know is one in Scotland as it's my initials and would be an easy way to get a personal reg!
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Gunther starts with RA
So does my Motorbike - but it was first registered by a Grimsby dealership !
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I think it's irrelevant today. People move around more, lease and fleet cars are disposed of at auctions all over the UK, and basically I don't really think anyone cares where the car came from any more.
No point in proposing personal registrations at the moment though, it'll take years for public confidence to recover after the recent data loss scandals.
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There doesn't seem much support for regional identifiers so far, so why not abolish regional identification completely? That way a car's (relative) age would be the only thing to glean from a registration number and no letters would be wasted. "AB12CDE" gives us over 643 million combinations, then "ABC12DE" another 643 million. Add another letter ("ABC12DEF") and that's another 1.5 billion!
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I meant to add, this would mean getting rid of the half yearly number, too. Once we get to 08, go on to 09, 10 etc. as and when the numbers are actually needed. No more six monthly surges in car registrations. Any (issued or unissued) six character combination from UK or Ireland could be bought and sold as vanity plates.
Compulsory insurance (and MOT where applicable) stickers/chips on numberplates of all cars.
Sorted.
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Given that around 60% of new cars are leased by companies and registered wherever the leasing company finds convenient, I think the whole point of localised registrations has been lost and is now pointless.
A minority of drivers are snobbish about number plates, I suspect that the new system was devised just to extract money from that minority.
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Has anyone noticed how many "ex demonstator" cars for sale have AF, or similar East Anglian regs, and around 10000 miles on the clock?
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would it be beneficial to know that a car you were interested in had spent most of its life "breathing" salty sea air and getting the body work attacked as well ?
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The registration won't tell you that - coastal county registered cars may actual spend their entire life inland, and vice versa.
Edited by Pugugly {P} on 24/12/2007 at 17:07
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My new car is an RJ prefix - registered in (and supplied from Reading by the leasing company. Car will be used exclusively in Edinburgh / Scotland. When car goes for disposal, it gets taken to auction in Leeds!
Interesting how Edinburgh wouldn't issue SN07 numbers, but used TN07 instead. They reckoned it would read like SNOT and not be acceptable to the snotty upper class.....!!
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Has anyone noticed how many "ex demonstator" cars for sale have AF or similar East Anglian regs and around 10000 miles on the clock?
The vast majority of 6-9 month old cars finding their way on to franchised dealers forecourts with ~10K on the clock are ex-rentals. If these are sold as 'demonstrators', then Trading Standards need to be informed. V5 will show original registrant. These often appear to be registered in the South East. Don't know where 'AD' is from, but see a lot of Fiats registered there. (my wife's Punto, for instance - bought at 6 months old / 3.5K miles from a Fiat franchise in the Scottish highlands (ex - rental)
Also be aware that some cars will be pre-registered by the supplying dealer group to get big discounts, and finally, some manufacturers / importers, will pre-register cars for press and media use.
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