I have to thank Owain for enlightening me on British registration plates.
What a wealth of knowledge ! The information I previously had was sketchy
and some of it inaccurate. Thanks to Owain I now have a better and more
accurate understanding. That's what I love about this list !
I don't know how much of this was posted to the list from Owain but the
following is what I'm taking away from Owain's input. Thanks ! Darrell
Condensed from Owain's emails:
"...adding some colo(u)r to the history:
"all cars in the uk always have and still do have registration for life
and there are not and never have been any vanity plates. however, you
can transfer a registration from one vehicle to another and you can
buy unassigned registrations from DVLA at auction. this is why cool
plates are so crazily expensive.
"originally plates are short and simple like "A 1" or "OIL 10" just
because there were so few cars in the country. these plates are still
valid and are worth a fortune. then some time in i think the late
'30s plate followed the pattern of XXX 123 and 123 XXX where 123 was
any number from 1 to 999. (except 666 - they were reissued more
recently). the last two XX's represented the region of registration
as until recently. in 1963 they added an 'A' to the end of the
numbers and all plates were of the form XXX 123A where A meant 1963
(actually the years ran from august to august). each year they
incremented the letter at the end (skipping Q reserved for kit cars
and I because it looks like a 1 and U and Z and maybe a couple more).
after Y in 1982, they moved the letter to the beginning and had A123
XXX and kept going up to Y again.
"at this point, in 2001, they started a new format and changed the year
indicator twice a year. the new format is XX51 YYY where XX is a new
region identifier, 5 means registration was in the second half of the
year, 0 means the first half. 1 means 2001 and YYY is a random
triplet of letters.
"DVLA try not to issue any rude words but a few (plenty actually) such
as PEN 1S slipped through.
"when you register a car, they give you the number and you have to go
and get number plates made in an auto store. as mountjoy pointed out
this is harder now because you (usually) need to show the document.
"so there you are ... a brief history of UK number plates.
"incidentally, the law change here for showing entitlement to gain
physical plates is only for 'road use' plates not 'show' plates which
are actually identical so its a meaningless law. see
http://www.classic-number-plate.com/ - you can order any plate you
like from there to replace your damaged ones. either stick on or
pressed metal...
"as far as origin is concerned (with "ADU", for example), the A is
meaningless. the second two letters (in this case DU) were used to
specify the region where the car was first registered. DU was coventry.
cambridge was ER. (see http://www.right-reg.co.uk/number_plates/issued )
"cambridge was actually all of: ER, AV, VA, CE, JE and EB. i think
some of the rootes cars had ER and EB which may be the source of your
confusion.
"coventry had a ton of assignments due to all the cars made there (many
new cars were/are sold already registered).
"all this changed when we switched to the new style plates after
running out of letters at the end, and running out again with them at
the beginning.
"the lore of number plates its pretty much all common knowledge if you
grow up a car buff in england :)..."
Graham Vickery, STOC principal, has published a couple of editorials in
STOC's newsletter, "Cats Whiskers", that deal with Tiger registration in the
UK and the DVLA (the equivalent of the Dept. of Motor Vehicles in the US).
He lists the DVLA as having a Vehicle Enquiry facility at:
http://www.vehiclelicense.gov.uk/EvlPortalApp/ where one can check some
records of a UK Tiger.
----------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "handy" <handy@cruzio.com>
To: "Mountjoy" <mtjoy@telis.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 4:58 PM
Subject: ADU
> Hi Darrell,
>
> I bought these plates for my MK 1a. Could you please enlighten me? I
> would appreciate it.
>
> Thanks for your time,
>
> Ross
>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> IMG_0002.JPG
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