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Number Plate History
brief history of the u.k. car number plate system
"The Motor Car Act 1903" started everything off .It said that every car had to be registered with a county council or county borough council, and every car had to display a unique identifying number issued to them by such a council .
Initially each council was issued one letter to use on the number plates , they could not have known how popular the motor car was to become and as the number of cars increased they quickly ran out of combinations ,so they started to use two and then three letter combinations.
By 1963 several councils were close to the end of their allocation, so a 7th digit was added to the Number Plate System. This extra digit was a letter ,so post 1963 numbers had three letters then a space then up to 3 numbers and then another letter this last letter gave the age of the car. Click HERE to see a table of suffix letters.
The letters I Q Z O and U were never used as a suffix letter in fact I Q and Z were never used at all.
By 1983 they faced the same problem but deftly extended the system by reversing the number plate giving a letter first then up to 3 numbers then a space then 3 more letters. The first letter now gave the age of the car. Click HERE to view a table of prefix identifiers.
By 2001 the problem was looming again and the current system was introduced. Now each number plate has 7 digits and the first two letters give the region of the country where the car was first registered, followed by two numbers which give the age of the car and then three random letters . An example of this could be NE51 XXX. The NE tells you the car is from the North East of England (click HERE for a table of these region identifiers). The 51 tells you it was registered in September 2001 and the last three letters mean nothing.
