Car Dealers Reg Plates

It’s no overstatement to describe Britain as a car-loving nation. Car dealers everywhere know it, and the amount of traffic on the road seems to prove we really are obsessed with our automobiles. During the heavy blizzards this winter, I witnessed real dedication from one of the UK’s countless motorphiles: a man lovingly washing his BMW one Sunday afternoon, not uncommon of course, apart from the fact he was seemingly oblivious to the snow falling around him.

The importance that some people ascribe to their vehicles seems to me to be defined by one thing in particular: the personalised number plate. Why is it that so many of us have such a fascination with our car registration plates? Are people really interested if those relatively small black letters and numbers seem to spell out our nicknames?

Certainly, the DVLA seem to believe so.

For those interested, they offer an online personalised plate service where you can quickly check just how much more than the basic plate rate of £250 the plate ‘ORG 45M’ will cost you. Try it, it’s fun – for a minute or two, at least. For what begins as a novel way of adding something extra to your driving experience, quickly becomes an exercise in frivolity.

In January 2009, the registration plate “1 HRH” became the most expensive plate ever sold in the UK for the sum of £113,815! Okay, so the plate (and the price!) suggest it might have been the Royals themselves making such a ridiculous purchase, but the fact remains, we just love to pay to personalise our number plates.

So what do we actually want to say about ourselves with a cherished plate? Is it merely to help the public recognise who is driving what about town? Or are we making a statement about our own personality? Manchester United and England footballer Wayne Rooney famously paid over £10,000 for his old plate “WAZ 8” – a reference to his nickname, ‘Wazza’. Fun, yes. But worth ten grand…?

There are some plates though whose owners paid such ridiculous prices even Wayne Rooney would wince. The registration ‘F1’ was sold in 2008 for over £440,000. Yes, for two black letters/numbers on a piece of plastic! And in Abu Dhabi – where apparently, money really does grow on trees – the simple number ‘1’ was purchased for a staggering £7.25 million!

It’s not only the British who are obsessed with number plates, then. Maybe struggling car dealers should re-examine their strategy and start buying and selling used cars with interesting number plates. There’s bound to be a rich businessman looking to waste a fortune on a Ford Mondeo with the plate ‘BA54 TAD’ on it, somewhere.