My husband and I watch a lot of Top Gear and have started watching “Wheeler Dealers” on our HD Theater channel. We love to watch Edd Chyna rehab the old autos. Anyway, we notice that when they buy the vehicle from the seller, sellers list their cars saying something like “it has a “B” plate”. I’m gathering that in the UK the license plate is sold with the vehicle and that the letter means something. Is that correct? What does it mean?
We are incredibly curious. Thanks.
Do you mean the ‘B’ at the very beginning of the plate? That letter signifies the year the car was bought. As I no longer live there I have lost track of which letter corresponds to which year (I used to drive a 1989 car with an H at the beginning of the plate). We call the whole number the car’s registration plate/number, often shortened to its ‘reg’.
The last 3 letters of the registration are code for the place the car was 1st registered - you have to be ‘in the know’ to identify these, but plenty of people do!
Here in Ireland we have a much more obvious system, for example:
09 D 3455 would mean a car registered in 2009, in Dublin and was the 3455th car to be registered.
Top gear was voted the no1 TV programme in the UK last year - you are in good company:)
Hope that helps - Irishmam (who is really British)
Nowadays they use numbers to denote years.
I think that they change in April and October now instead of August as they used to.
The letters at the beginning denote place first registered.
For example LD is London and ST is related to Scotland.