First of all the letters on the front of the registration plate used to signify the
year of the car - every year, (1st September) there would be a new registration letter
out, it went from A to Y (don't know why they missed out Z) but they missed out I and
O too because they looked too much like 1's and 0's. These were called prefix registrations,
(prefix registration example: A123 ABC) (The last two letters would show where the car
was registered i.e which town/county).
When they ran out of letters (i.e got all the way up to Y)
they introduced suffix registrations, what would happen then is that the letter
signifying the year of the car would be on the end of the plate instead of the front of it
for example the plate i mentioned above would read 'ABC 123A', so they went through
a long period of swapping to and from prefix and suffix registrations, the last
'batch' of prefix registrations ran early in the 1980s through to 2000 when they
decided to register cars in periods of 6 months rather than every year for various
different reasons. They were also approaching the end of the alphabet again,
they were on T when they changed it over to 6 month periods i believe.
They decided not to continue with the prefix/suffix registration plates anymore,
so they introduced a new scheme which started on the 1st September 2001 where
all plates would be the following format: First two letters was where the car
was registered, second two letters would show the period/year the car was registered
and the last three letters would just be random, I, O and Z are included in the
new registration format. September 2001 was '51' the 5 showed that it
was the second period of registration in that year and the 1 stood for '01, cars
registered in March 2002 would be '02 (the 0 shows that it was the first period of
registration in that year) and cars registered in September 2002 are '52 reg, which
is what i have. (KY indicates where it was registered)
Below is a list of the new plate identifiers and when they will be implemented
(they have done them up to 2049 but i don't think we need to go that far
):
Year March September
2001 51
2002 02 52
2003 03 53
2004 04 54
2005 05 55
2006 06 56
2007 07 57
2008 08 58
2009 09 59
2010 10 60
Hope this helped - Ben
[ November 01, 2002, 07:05: Message edited by: BenjaminTDIPD ]
The cars in the background belong to my parents just incase you are wondering, and the benz is an E320 CDI (my mother has the right idea about fuel type aswell as me
) Sorry for the size of these pics, it's ridiculous but it's the best I can do.
