dg comments

please empty your brain below

I was a kid in Leicester when we regularly walked past the car with A1 as its registration and ABC1 was the mayoral limousine.
Given that we lived two doors from the Lord Mayor at one point, we saw this quite frequently.

Helen D Vecht | 03.11.20 - 1:26 a.m. | #

Q wasn't used as an age identifier, but there will still be vehicles out there with it as a plate letter. Just in case you want to make it more challenging

Ian | 03.11.20 - 6:33 a.m. | #

I haven't seen a single Q in the last month,
So, too challenging.

diamond geezer | Homepage | 03.11.20 - 7:02 a.m. | #

I have a lot of time, but still won't be playing Alphabetical by Registration Letter.

Frank F | 03.11.20 - 7:18 a.m. | #

One reason for not seeing registrations begining with "C" is that the Cx prefix signifies a vehicle first registered in Wales.(Cymru is the Welsh for Wales)

But the area code can't explain everything to do with the frequency. e.g. "S" scores highly in your count but this is for Scotland. I'd expect to see more "C"s than "S"s in London.

Jon Jones | 03.11.20 - 7:24 a.m. | #

I was only looking at registration letters (1983-2001), not area codes (2001-present).

For area codes, see my previous research.

diamond geezer | Homepage | 03.11.20 - 7:26 a.m. | #

I live in Sevenoaks and several cars locally display their home allegiance with plates personalised to place rather than their name or business. Variations of OAK OAX and 7, SEV etc are growing in number, helped by the relatively higher levels of disposable income in these parts.

Plate-spotting (area codes) was a great pastime for me as a child, using my I-SPY book. Never spotted a Z for Zetland and never knew where that was, either (Shetland).

Waterhouse | 03.11.20 - 8:09 a.m. | #

I suppose it is possible to distinguish 'personal' plates from the others, by careful inspection of the vehicle and good knowledge of vehicle make/model history. But it strikes me as a process susceptible to occasional error.

Malcolm of Kent | 03.11.20 - 8:10 a.m. | #

Slightly bemused that 'only' 7% of cars have personalised numberplates.
While we can hardly blame the DVLA for devising a system that allows people to volunteer to pay extra tax, I am staggered that seemingly 1 in 14 of us have fallen for it.

Will | 03.11.20 - 8:19 a.m. | #

Come to think, categorizing first names as either Christian or Asian is a bit over-simple. I know quite a few Christian Asians, and there are also many non-Christian non-Asians, probably many of the readers here (though they may have first names with a christian origin).

Malcolm | 03.11.20 - 8:20 a.m. | #

The letters S to Y were only used for half a year, which may explain the peak in the graph at "R"

dg writes: It does not. "Almost all the Rs I saw were personalised."

Personalised marks with prefixes A to G were not issued straight away but one letter at a time over a period from 1992 to around 2010. Hence "A" vanity marks have been available a lot longer than "F" and "G" have been, which may have some influence on the shape of the early part of the graph.

timbo | 03.11.20 - 8:30 a.m. | #

The number of personalised plates is boosted by the likes of coach company Grey's of Ely, who have many vehicles with plates like "G 1 ELY".

Some companies like to disguise the age of their vehicles, which personalised plates allow them to do. Not saying that Grey's are necessarily doing this! It's obviously simpler for them to be able to refer to "coach 5" to mean "G 5 ELY".

miker | 03.11.20 - 12:28 p.m. | #

I also kept an eye out for registration letters at the end of plates (as issued 1963-1983).

But I only saw ten of these in four days (all different letters). They're really infrequent.

Letter at start of plate: 10
Letter at end of plate: 450

diamond geezer | Homepage | 03.11.20 - 3:20 p.m. | #

Remember counting registration letters on a bus trip from King's Lynn to Nottingham. Would have been about 1979 or so (a different world where my mum was happy to put an 11 yo me on a bus to travel solo and be met by my Aunt at the other end). "A" plates were even rarer than the solubility of cars of that era would have suggested, as some areas carried on issuing the old system for part of that year.

The journey also sticks in my mind as I consumed a whole packet of Pontefract Cakes en route.

Putters | 03.11.20 - 3:34 p.m. | #

I prefer Yellow Car

Ned | 03.11.20 - 5:45 p.m. | #

There was an economic recession in 1991 which might help to explain the lack of Hs. But otherwise there seems little correlation with GDP.

Peter | 04.11.20 - 1:04 p.m. | #

It seems the perfect plate for you is available, with just two basic conditions.
1) You'd need a vehicle to put it on; and
2) probably a considerable amount of cash.

RogerW | 04.11.20 - 10:09 p.m. | #

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