2010 Car Number Plates

We’re now just over a month away from the introduction of the 2010 number plate on all new cars hitting the road after the beginning of March.

While the excitement surrounding the introduction of new number plates may go over some people’s heads, during the past few years a real demand has grown for personalised plates, with some selling for an absolute fortune at auction.

Music legend Elton John’s former number plate ELT 70N recently went up for auction for just under £1,000, but that’s nothing compared to the £113,815 one crazy person (in the nicest sense) shelled out on a 1 HRH number plate auctioned by the DVLA at the beginning of 2009. And even that has some way to go to surpass £254,000 paid to take ownership of the 51 NGH plate.

Registration Number Auction Bidding Service. Why not let us take the strain. We can bid on your behalf upto a pre-arranged figure based on actual market values, avoiding the pitfalls of 'auction fever' and paying too much.

Our years of experience assure you of a professional service at all times. We can keep you informed during the auction by telephone so you will always know how the bidding is going.

Diplomatic Plates ‘D’ what are they?

Diplomatic plates

Since 1979 cars operated by foreign embassies, high commissions, consular staff, and various international organisations have been given plates with a distinguishing format of three numbers, one letter, three numbers. The letter is D for diplomats or X for accredited non-diplomatic staff. The first group of three numbers identifies the country or organisation to whom the plate has been issued, the second group of three numbers is a serial number, starting at 101 for diplomats (although some embassies were erroneously issued 100), 400 for non-diplomatic staff of international organisations, and 700 for consular staff. Thus, for example, 101 D 101 identifies the first plate allocated to the Afghanistan embassy, 900 X 400 is the first plate allocated to the Commonwealth Secretariat.

The first series of number plates were issued in 1903 and ran until 1932, using the series A 1 to YY 9999. The letter or pair of letters indicated the local authority in whose area the vehicle was registered, for example A – London, B – Lancashire, C – West Riding of Yorkshire. In England and Wales the letter codes were initially allocated in order of population size (by the 1901 census) whilst Scotland and Ireland had their own sequences incorporating the letters "S" and "I" respectively, which were allocated alphabetically: IA = Antrim, IB = Armagh, etc. When a licensing authority reached 9999, it was allocated another two letter mark, but there was no pattern to these subsequent allocations as they were allocated on a first come first served basis. There are three interesting anomalies where a zero has been issued – The Lord Provost of Edinburgh has S 0 and his Glasgow counterpart has G 0 while the official car of the Lord Provost of Aberdeen has RG 0. In addition the Lord Mayor of London has the registration LB 0.