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The Motor Car Act of 1903, which came into force on January 1, 1904, required all vehicles to be registered with the authorities, and to carry number plates. The act was passed in order that vehicles could be easily traced in the event of an accident or contravention of the law.
Car plates are rectangular or sqaure in shape, with the exact permitted dimensions of the plate and its lettering set down in law.
Current plates have black characters on reflective white (for the front plate) or on reflective yellow (for the rear plate).
Older plates had white or silver characters in relief on a black background. This style of plate was phased out in 1972, and is now only legal to be carried on cars registered prior to that date.
The current system for Great Britain was introduced in 2001. There is another scheme for Northern Ireland. Each registration consists of exactly seven characters. From left to right the characters consist of:
With this scheme, a buyer can tell the year of a car without having to look it up, and the preceding area code letters are usually what is remembered by witnesses – it is then quite simple to narrow down suspect vehicles to a much smaller number by checking the authority's database without having to know the full number. This scheme should have sufficient numbers to run until 2050.
Registrations having a combination of characters that are particularly appealing (resembling a name, for example), are auctioned each year.
Vehicles registered under previous numbering systems continue to retain their original registration plates. Subject to certain conditions, registration plates – some of which can be worth tens of thousands of pounds – can be transferred between vehicles by the vehicle owner.
The first series of number plates ran until 1932, using the series A1–YY9999. The letter or pair of letters indicated the local area where the vehicle was registered, for example A – London, B – Lancashire, C – YorkshireThis article is about the English county. For other uses, see Yorkshire (disambiguation). traditional county. White Yorkshire rose. Yorkshire is the largest traditional county of England, covering some 6,000 sq. 15,000 km²) with a population of some five, etc. The letter codes were allocated arbitrarily according to when the registration office opened in that region.
By 1932, the available numbers within this scheme were running out, and an extended scheme was introduced. This scheme consisted of three letters and three numbers, taken from the series AAA1 to YYY999. Note that certain letters – O, I, Q and Z – were never used, as they were considered too easy to mistake for other letters or numbers, or were reserved for special use, such as the use of I and Z for Irish registrations.
The three letter scheme preserved the area letter codes as the second pair of letters in the set of three, and the single letter area codes were deleted (since prefixing a single letter code would create a duplicate of a two-letter code). In some areas, the available numbers with this scheme started to run out in the 1950sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s Years: 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 Events and trends Technology United States tests the first fusion bomb., and in those areas, a reversed sequence was introduced, i.e. 1AAA–999YYY. The ever-increasing popularity of the car can be gauged by noting that these sequences ran out within ten years, and by the beginning of the 1960sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s Years: 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 Events and trends The 1960s was a turbulent decade of change around, a further change was made in very popular areas, introducing 4-number sequences with two letter area codes, but in the reverse direction to the early scheme – i.e. 1AA–9999YY.
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