Reprise: UK vanity licence plates still make little sense… from July of last year

WE57 HAM is a UK license number plate that sold last year in a department of motor vehicle auction for £57,000 ($112,000). There are 500 supporters of the West Ham United Football (soccer) Club that would have paid that amount to have that prized plate. It shattered the previous record of £36,000 ($74,000) pounds for AR53 NAL which everyone in this country but me seems to think easily equates to the Arsenal Gunners football club.

I don’t get it. 

The buying and selling of fancy number plates is big business here. If for some reason I want the plate 5 PL, it will only cost me £24,500 at the website  www.UKnumberplates.org. This one only took about three minutes to figure out. 5=S so you would be the proud owner of a plate promoting the Scottish Premiere League (the top league of Scottish football).

Others are not so simple and every time I see a plate driving along the Motorway, I can puzzle for up to 20-minutes and still not have a clue because they can be very oblique. In our village there is a lady in an SUV with the plate 51 CN. She assured me she was not 51 and that CN were here initials. OK… so what does the 51 mean! And why bother spend the money if it does not fit your purpose?

I went back to the website and after reading this instruction… “Please do not forget that you cannot make your car appear newer than it is by choosing a newer personalised registration plate. If you are purchasing an ‘R’ prefix registration, you cannot put it on a “P” registered vehicle. Similarly new-style registrations cannot be used to make your vehicle appear newer. This means an “03″ plate cannot be transferred onto a “51″ plated car…”

I decided I needed professional help.

I spoke to company owner Martin Davies, and he told me that there are 4 styles of plate that would fit my 2002 Mitsubushi (which he could tell it was registered between September of ‘02 and March of ’03 by the number). I could have a Prefix, Cherished, Vanity or 02 plate. All would work (yeah?!?), but… because of the existing 02 registration number I could not have a plate with 51 or 52 in it (boo!) because I cannot make my car look younger than it is.

Clear as mud? I now at least understand why my neighbour has this ridiculous looking 51 in her initialled plate, because it has to be there!

Next I had to learn the numeric alphabet 7=T, 5=S, 3=E, 4=A and so on… those are relatively easy. But there is another problem, sometimes with only 10-digits from which to choose, there is no easy match to what you wish to spell. So if I want to immortalise The Vadimus Post on my little Mitsubishi I have a new set of challenges. VADIMUS does not fit the format and… I cannot have any number higher than 02.

So, the combination for Vadimus that works on my car alone is: V401 MUS. When I asked Martin how he came up with that he said, “the 4=A and 1=I and 0 sort of looks like a D.”

There is nothing I can write here so we’ll just let that sink in.

My practical Dutch wife says, “in Holland we don’t care. We get our car with the plate on it and that’s that. The idea would never work.” Of course in the USA we’ve gone a bit number plate crazy. Not only can you have just about any series of words on a licence plate, but schools, groups and organisations use their group persona to raise money – “convert your number plate to a Boston College number plate for only $250 and show your BC pride.”

At least I could get the word VADIMUS from the registry of motor vehicles in Massachusetts with a BC background. I cannot imagine this helps motor crime investigations one bit.

There was a time when red letters on a white background meant the plate was from the state of Massachusetts and you knew that and could tell the police the state and number instantly, they tracked the guy down, crime solved.

Now the art work is so prettified and my eyesight so poor, forget trying to provide anything more descriptive than, “it had a sky blue background and the script letters might have said Ohio and the first number could have been a 6…”

Oh well, progress. It has obviously created a business for Martin and I remember a co-worker talking about a vanity plate she coveted and yes, would spend the £1,000 to buy it for her car!?! I won’t be welcome at West Ham any time soon but this seems a bit crazy. In the meantime I have a busy morning ahead of me as the graphic design people will need to create a new look for the website.

Welcome to the V401 MUS Post!