Get an Awesome Number Plate for Your New Car

Personalised reg plate
Personalised reg plate

If you have just bought the car of your dreams, or at least one you really like, then you might want to consider adding a customised registration plate. There’s nothing wrong with a bog-standard number plate of course, but they do give the age of your car away and they don’t add the special cache to your car that a custom reg plate does. More importantly, a plain old number plate will stand out for all the wrong reasons, prompting even random strangers to complain about how your new BMW X7, Toyota GR Supra or Ford Mustang is losing some of its oomph factor!

Even if you don’t actually own a supercar, business is the primary reason why most people opt for private or personalised number plates. It could be representative of your brand philosophy, by sporting a proper slogan, or the plate could be made to look like the logo of your company. The choice is, of course, yours, but we are here to give you a few pointers that will help you to avoid expensive mistakes and get exactly what you want from your registration plates builder.

Consider All Your Options First

Be it number plates or anything else in the world, how would you know the best options unless you have seen all of them? This registration plates builder presents all personalisation options to the customer so you can build and customise every aspect of your number plate. Number1Plate’s registration plates builder tool works completely online, giving you maximum freedom to choose the material, size, badge, border designs, font/text styles and even the slogan. Use the web tool to experiment with the available options and see what appeals to you the most, before finalising your choices and ordering the plate right from there.

Should Budget be a Concern?

All plates were originally sold by the DVLA whre they can be cheap but the shorter or more meaningful they are the more expensive they are. The special names given to DVLA plates like ‘private’, ‘custom’, and ‘cherished’ just highlight registrations that are meaningful for some reason and therefore worth more. In most cases, these registrations will have been bought by a private buyer or a specialist registration company so you tend to buy them from third parties rather than the DVLA.

Given the best registrations can sell for hundreds of thousands, budget is usually a factor for most of us. Then again, if you did just buy a Mercedes Benz, Maybach Exelero, or a Lamborghini Veneno, then this does not apply to you of course!

Most people buy a plate in the range of £500 – £3000+). The budget for the number plate should have some degree of proportion to the value of the car though because cheap number plates on luxury models look really misplaced and misrepresent you or your brand. If commercial branding is on your mind, then the budget can be extended to some degree, in light of the customised plate’s marketing potentials. Another option to find a plate is available at AutoPlatesDirect who have created this number plate maker that lets you design your personalised number plate.

DVLA Guidelines

Finally, we can’t forget about the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) guidelines, as they are essential for road safety and legal compliance. Make sure to visit the official site linked above to know more about the requirements. However, the following highlights should help you get introduced to the main guidelines as set by the UK government:

  • The first of the two letters on a UK number plate represents the area of registration (E – Essex, L-London, O – Oxford, etc.)
  • The second letter represents a particular office in the area where the vehicle was registered
  • The next two numbers in the middle designate the age of a car.

Determining the age of a car registered in the UK can be quite complicated, but you need to understand it all the same before ordering your registration plates.

How the DVLA Assigns the Middle Numbers to a Vehicle

If a plate was issued after 28th February and within 31 st August in 2018, it will have 18 as its middle number, so this one is actually not that complicated and pretty straightforward. However, if the plate was issued after 31 st August 2018 and before 28th February 2019, the issuing will follow the 60 Format, or at least it did until last year. From 2020 onwards, all UK number plates will follow the 70 format instead, replacing the 60 format permanently. This will continue to change at the beginning of every decade, as far as we can tell.

The current 70 format, or the 60 format used until last year, combines the last number of the registration year, and the first number of the 60 or 70 format to make up the middle numbers of a UK license plate. For example, a plate registered in October 2019 will still have followed the 60 format, sporting the middle number as 69. If it was issued in January 2020, however, 70 would be the middle number on that plate.

Slightly complicated as it may be, it’s necessary to not get your middle numbers wrong while experimenting with your registration plates builder online. If you do, then you will either have to pay again immediately for a correction, or even for a brand-new plate. If you do display the wrong plate on your car, then you will have to change it anyway, but along with a £1,000+ fine!

So, although there are a few things to consider, getting personalised number plates is a great idea for all petrol heads.