June 5, 2020 Timothy Kaye

Understanding Private Number plates – What should be your approach to selecting your cherished number plate?

Automobile

A number plate is not simply a number plate. It’s a way to uniquely identify a vehicle and displaying a number plate on a car is a legal requirement in the UK. Most vehicle owners in the UK aren’t familiar with the importance of a number plate.

In this article, I’d like to highlight the importance of a number plate for the following reasons:

• It can give a car a unique personality.
• It meets legal requirements enforced by the government of the UK.

Simply put, your car’s wheels are not allowed to touch the road unless you get your car a number plate.

Beyond the Law

Car owners consider it a legal requirement to assign number plates to their car. While that’s the truth, a number plate’s importance is not restricted to its legality. It can add a creative/sarcastic/humorous feel to an otherwise ordinary car. This particular aspect of number plates fascinates me and it will fascinate you once you fully understand how the system works.

Number Plate Ideas

It is important to have clear ideas about the number plate you would like with a clear focus on the names or themes you would like to create. There are some car owners that do not give this due consideration and end up with a registration number that they do not like. They are too hasty and fail to consider all the options available to them like choosing items of grocery with little concern about the taste. They need to unleash their creativity and come up with novel ideas for registration numbers with due consideration to the long term and not just the short term.

Number plate searches

It may not be as easy as it sounds. Creative ideas require lots of thought with regard to the number and letter combinations for ideas to manifest. Similarly, your creativity needs to be aligned to availability. Number plate searches for available ones can help to confirm current availability in the market place. Third-party vendor websites are useful for this. Third-party registration brokers are specialists that market all available combinations based on market requirements.

Third-party vendors create specific categories into which they can group the search results. When someone visits a vendor’s website, he or she will find the registration categories that are popular choices based on available combinations and previous customer searches. This process is really helpful to all those people who are struggling with number plate ideas.

Number plate categories

There are a large number of categories available because there are a large number of third party vendors with customized categories featured on their websites.

Some of these categories are detailed as follows:

• Names or nicknames
• Date of birth or year related
• Hobbies and personal interests
• Fun and sarcasm
• Initials

Other categories are available over and above these popular categories but not all of them are equally inclusive. The popular categories above include the majority of number plates available.

Let me demystify each of these categories for you.

Names and Nicknames

For the purposes of explaining let’s say your name is Eddie Hopkins. You can create a custom number plate for your car such as “EDD 1E” or “EDD 1H” or “ED60 HOP”

There are multiple letter-number combinations for license plates through which a unique word can be expressed. For example, you can choose letter combinations such as “DVD”, “DAV” or “DVY” to denote the name, David.

Date of Birth

Similar to names and nicknames, a number plate can indicate the owner’s date of birth or year of birth. As an example let’s say the owner was born on March 6, 1962, and his name is Paul Mark Chamberlain. The number plate can bear his initials and year of birth as follows PC62 PMC or alternatively, he can select PC63 PMC combining his day and month of birth with his initials.

Hobbies and Interest

Different people have different areas of interest. They can tell the world what is of interest to them by picking a custom number plate, which reflects their areas of interest. If rap music interests an owner, he can select “MY04 RAP” as his number plate. If animals interest him, he can go for “K9 DOG”, “PU55 CAT” or “M3 OWW.” If sports are of interest then he or she could pick “SP04 RTY” or “P1 OLO” or “H10 RSE in declaring an interest in SPORT, POLO, or HORSES.

In summary, it is fairly easy to indicate an interest in a sport or a hobby using the letter and number combinations available.

Fun and Sarcasm

Number plates can be used for fun and for displaying humor. The car owner can select letters and numbers that indicate a sense of humor or an element of fun. Examples of letter combinations that are typically used in this way are “AHA”, “WOW”, “YAY”, “SLO” “LOL”….. A car displaying any such combination conveys a lighthearted and cheerful message to onlookers.

There are more

That’s not all; there are additional number plate categories that are equally entertaining or distinctive. The make or model of a car is one such category. A car manufactured by Audi can have a number plate such as “R8 AUD” or “AUD 1E” or “AUD 1”

It’s really fun

The more you dig into it, the more entertaining it will get. If you have more than one car or if you are planning to buy more cars in the future, understanding number plate categories can be really helpful, particularly if you want to personalize your car and send a message to onlookers.