~ I have a very easy question: Is the correct plate for California in 1959
~ Yellow on Black (YOB) or Black on Yellow (BOY) ?
YOB. In fact, it should probably begin with a letter between, oh, D and F.
~ I have a 59 Austin Healey Sprite that came (from the last owner) with a
~ YOB plate, but when I got to work on it (cover some scratches) I noticed
~ that it has printed a big 63 under all the yearly stickers.
A number of things might be responsible for this. The most likely is
that the car was originally purchased out of state and brought into
California in 1963. For the record, our '63 122S has its original
plates, and that 63 is clearly visible on our front plate. That
car was originally purchased in Palo Alto, California in November of
1962, during the 1963 model year, and its license plate letters are LPK.
(The original purchasers got $500 as a trade-in on their 1957 Cadillac,
as a piece of fascinating trivia made possible by the fact that they
kept every piece of paper associated with that car for 30 years. :-)
~ I know for sure that in 1956, the correct plate was BOY and in 1963 it was
~ YOB, but what happened in between ? Did all cars went through a plate change
~ in 1963 ?
My first car was a 1958 Karmann-Ghia that my dad had purchased new in
1958, license place COS 572. (One remembers these things... :-) I
remember that my grandparents had bought a car the same weekend and
its license number was COS 574. Our '56 Mercury was BOY, and, let's
see, KYF 446. But we got rid of that in, oh, 1964 or so.
There was no mass changeover in 1963; my Ghia still had the original
plates when it passed to me in late 1971. There are many explanations
for why your Sprite has a 63 plate, with the most probable already
mentioned. It's unlikely but possible that the car wasn't sold till
late 1962 for some reason, after having been in dealer inventory for
three years? Probably not; a more romantic explanation would be that
it had been used as a race car for the first two or three years and
was finally titled in late '62 or '63. There's a Sprite in southern
California, for instance, that has *never* been registered on the
street -- Elliot Forbes-Robinson bought it new, it went straight to
get an SCCA logbook, and when I knew it, Greg Neal was using it in
SCCA Solo II competition with a very strong overbored 1275 in DP.
Sounds like a potentially interesting history there. Have you already
acquired the British Motoring Heritage build data for your car? (Or
is that before they kept records? I can't recall.)
--Scott
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