Re: [lro] OT - British Registration Letters

From: Ian Stuart (Ian.Stuart@ed.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Mar 04 2003 - 07:04:44 EST

  • Next message: John Cranfield: "Re: [lro] OT - British Registration Letters"

    On Tue, 2003-03-04 at 09:50, Phil Norris wrote:
    > Initially there were plates with three letters followed by three numbers. I
    > think it was the last two of the leters showed the registration town, so the
    > Police could, at a glance, tell where the car was from. Pretty rapidly they
    > ran out of numbers ( well, by the late fifties anyway) so introduced an
    > extra letter at the end that indicated year.
    Initially there was a letter and a number (Lord sombody-or-other blagged
    A1 simply because he could pull strings) This was fine when the number
    of cars could be counted by a simple peasent, but then "simply everyone"
    got one, so a more defined system was introduced:

    two letters to give you the area the car was registerd, and a number up
    to 9999 for a sequence.

    Once this ran out, it went to 3 letter, 3 numbers.

    After that, it moved to 3 letters and three numbers, suffixed with a
    letter to indicate a year.

    and thus we get to:
    > So you get ABC123A. This was purely and simply to chop up the numbering
    > sequence and allow for expansion AFAIK. However, At the time, our car
    > industry was, and still is, fairly slow on model updates, so the same
    > looking car was produced for a number of years. I gather that Detroit at
    > the time was introducing different models yearly.... The only way to pull a
    > bit of one-up-manship was to have the same looking car but with the latest
    > plate for the year, introduced on the first of August every year.
    > Consequently car sales were low for the preceding few months then peaked
    > madly on that day. Garages opened at midnight for people to collect their
    > new cars and have them on the drive for the morning to go to work in and
    > park in the carpark.... In typical British fashion you didn't make a fuss
    > about a new car, just let everyone notice the plate......
    > Certain letters are not used as they look like numbers, Ie I Q and O, V not
    > U etc so they ran out after around twenty years. Then the system was
    > reversed so we had A123ABC. Same old system again certain numbers indicated
    > the area of registering, the 1st letter was the year numbers were arbitrary
    > AFAIK. This happened in the early 80s.
    > Yet again they ran out of letters, but wanted to introduce a whole new
    > system so the last few years were doubled up new letters appearing in March
    > as well as August. Started at S IIRC so the late 90s had years of ST then
    > VW, etc.
    > Now we have AA 01ABC, where AA is the registering town indicator, 01 is the
    > year and the ABC is the random bit. Just to ad a certain frisson to the
    > proceedings the 01 can also be 51 02/52 03/53 indicating August or March
    > respectively, 01 was August, 51 was the following March, O2 was the
    > following August etc etc etc......
    > Add in the Q suffix meaning a kitcar or bitsa, all the messing with spaces
    > to make anity plates ie V 8 LRO etc etc A 110 LWB or whatever and it can get
    > really silly!!

    -- 
    --==++
    Ian Stuart, PerlLaghu: Edinburgh University Data Library.
    

    Information is not knowledge Knowledge is not wisdom Wisdom is not truth Truth is not beauty Beauty is not love Love is not music -- Mary.

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