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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