Personalised number plates / Vanity Plates

Most Valuable

K1NGS is the most valuable number plate to be sold, fetching £231,000 in 1993. It was bought by the Sultan of Brunei.

Recently, the number plate F1 was auctioned. This registration is traditionally used for Essex County Council's chairman.
The first chairman to use the plate is thought to be Andrew Johnstone. He owned a four-seater Panhard Levassor back in 1904. Most recently the F1 designation was seen on Chairman Anthony Peel's Volvo S80.
F1 was auctioned for a reserve of around £350,000 in 2005, expecting to attract interest from the big names in Formula One but failed to sell.

Although not quite as valuable but just as desirable A1, the first ever British registration and first used by the Second Earl Russell in 1903 was also auctioned off and did fetch quite a bit of cash.

Law

The golden rule is that you cannot make the car appear younger than it is. So a car built in 2001 cannot display an 05 plate, for instance.
The rules for spacing and font apply just as equally to personalised plates as they do to regular issues registrations.

Source

You might well ask where I lot of these spare registration marks have come from. After all, you might expect that they will have been issued to a vehicle already. Not so. For a long time, the number 1-20 in a series have been reserved and since 1990, many other numbers have been reserved too.
The initial series reserved for the purposes of the DVLA Select Registrations scheme was 22, 30, 33, 40, 44, 50, 55, 60, 66, 70, 77, 80, 88, 90, 99, 100, 111, 200, 222, 300, 333, 400, 444, 500, 555, 600, 700, 777, 800, 888, 900, 999 & 666.
As the popularity of Select or Personalised Registrations increased, more numbers (1-33 and more) were routinely kept back over the years.
Also available are letter combinations that were never issued to any VRO, but not withheld for other reasons, e.g. exceptional value etc.

Many people like to hide the age of their vehicle, so undated registraion marks are highly sought after. Sources include classic cars, the now retiring London Routemaster buses and Northern Ireland marks.

All material (except tabulated data) is copyright 1999-2005 Peter Richardson.

You are free to copy and use tabulated data from here for your own purposes, other material remains copyright of the author and may not be reproduced in any form, except for fair use personal copies and academic purposes.

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