Registration Plates History
Vehicle registration plates to all motorised vehicles and trailers are legal requirement and serve many purposes not least to identify the vehicle. Most governments require a registration plate to be attached to both the front and rear of a vehicle, but with some such as motor cycles they only require one, usually attached to the rear. Information about the registered vehicle is kept on a national database, in the Britain this is the DVLA, which relates this registration plate number to information such as the make, model, colour, year of manufacture, and if the vehicle has a valid road worthiness certificate (MOT), insurance details and the name and address of the registered owner or keeper of the vehicle.
In the UK the registration plate has to conform to specific requirements in size, shape, colour and style of lettering. Vehicles manufactured prior to 1972 had registration plates which were white, grey or silver characters on a black background; this style of registration plate is no longer legal on vehicles built prior to 1 January 1973. All vehicles manufactured after 1 January 1973 must display number plates of reflex-reflecting material, white at the front and yellow at the rear, with black characters. In addition, characters on number plates purchased from 1 September 2001 must use a mandatory typeface and conform to set specifications as to width, height, stroke, spacing, and margins. This allows number plate recognition systems to “read” the plate to ascertain if the vehicle complies with all legal requirements such as insurance, vehicle excise duty (VED) and MOT certificate.
From 1963 the number of registered vehicles had risen to such an extent that the then current three letter and three number combinations had run out and a letter following the combination beginning with A was added as a suffix, eventually becoming a prefix. This letter became an “age identifier” allowing the buyer of a second hand vehicle to know the age of the vehicle without having to look it up.
From September 2001, a new system of number plates was introduced which continued with the age identifier on the plate in the form of the last two digits of the year, 09 for 2009 if issued between March and August, or else has 50 added for example 59 for September 2009 if issued between September and February the following year. The current system will have sufficient numbers to run until 2050.
UK Car Number Plate
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