Personalised Number Plate Gifts

Personalised number plates are very popular through out the UK and the rest of the world. With Christmas on the horizon Personalized number plate sales are increasing. Rude or funny number plates seem to be the choice of many along with sport related plates.

Number plates usually go for around £500 but they have been known to go for £30,000 or more. As gifts they can be difficult to pick, of course the lettering is important and must suit the recipient. Available number plates can be viewed here at cherished number plates and range in price in according to the demand for such a plate. The 51st series of number plates are also very popular among English Football fans because of the relation to England historic 5-1 victory over Germany.

If you can’t find a gift for a loved-one number plates are not to be overlooked. They can say a lot about a person and can prove to be a perfect present for almost anyone.

E-Flow Teething Problems

It seems that now more than ever, cities worldwide are adopting licence plate recognition systems to increase security and for congestion charges. However in Ireland, the teething problems are evident with people getting bills after they have paid the charges.

This has been driving motorists mad and has been in the news since the system launched back in the summer months. My question is as to why the people in charge of these new systems cannot come up with a fool-proof system for when they are starting off, thus avoiding these teething problems.

Perhaps an arrangement of checks to catch these rouge bills from reaching their destinations and keep the motorists happy!!!

How To Kill a ... Speed Camera?

They are the hatred of thousands of commuters, and although they are there for our safety to keep other drivers in check, speed cameras have become the recent target of angry motorists recently with record numbers of them being attacked.

I am in no way condoning these actions as they are highly illegal and could put you in jail, what dose interest me however is how these hot heads do it.

I have come across stories of people using brute force such as sledgehammers, fireworks and their vehicles themselves. These incidents can be put down to your average person of average intelligence, however some more intellectual (and I use this word loosely) have taken more... thoughtful approaches.

Using spray-paint to cover the cameras lenses, spraying adhesive over the over plate to blur the image, one man in America reportedly placed an industrial strength magnet on the side of the speed camera in a bid to scramble its electronics, and my personal favourite, wrapping the cameras in two inches (a tad of overkill) worth of cling film to sufficiently block and notable number plate images.

So the commuters worst enemy besides from the 8.30am traffic jam is certainly the subject of many beatings and 'blurrings'.

Suitable Number Plates

I was looking around on the internet the other day and came across a few number plates on offer that would suit a couple of our well known citizens quite well given their recent screw-ups! Why don’t they just by these plates because as we all know, the publicity alone from the paparazzi would be so extensive every many woman and child would know about it, and after all there’s no such thing as bad publicity!

A couple of the plates I think would do just fine on a few celebrity cars are:

1. HA5 8EEN- Gordon Brown
2. HA5 8OOZ- Amy Winehouse
3. HA5 8UST- Jordon
4. HI5 8IKE- Chris Hoy
5. HI5 8ALL- David Beckham
6. HI5 8OAT- Ben Ainslie
7. HE5 8ENT- Jeffrey Archer
8. HE5 8ACK- Daniel Craig (James Bond)
9. IT5 8UST- Adam Applegarth (former chief exec of Northern Rock)
10. HU5 8AND- Guy Richie

Not bad eh? And of course the price tags are a little on the wrong side of £20,000 but I’m sure they wouldn’t mind loosening the purse strings a little!

Number plate S 1 sells for new record

The Scottish number plate S 1 has sold for a new UK record price of £404,062.50 this evening at the Bonhams Goodwood Revival auction. The previous record, set only a few months ago was for the number plate F 1 which sold for £375,000.

The next most expensive plate was M 1 selling for £331,000.

This just goes to show that, in these tough 'credit crunch' times, there's still plenty of money being spent on personalised number plates!

Avoid tolls by covering your number plate

Recently some drivers in Ireland have been trying to avoid paying toll charges by covering the front of their number plates up. There are cameras on the M50, which read the vehicle’s number plate and automatically issue toll charges.

However some drivers have been caught trying to avoid the tolls by covering the front number plate. They weren’t bright enough to cover the rear number plate as well, and ended up with hefty fines of up to €1,000.

In one case the driver claimed that he didn’t realise that it was illegal to cover his number plates saying that he had done it as a prank. Unbelievingly he got away with it and didn’t pay a fine or go to prison!

Worlds Most Expensive Number Plates

Below is a list of the ten most expensive number plates. The majority of these registrations have been purchased in the last couple of years. Also as you can see from the table, most of them have either been bought in Hong Kong or Abu Dhabi.

Surprisingly the number ‘8’ registration wasn’t the most expensive one in Hong Kong, as 8 is meant to denote luck. Unsurprisingly in Abu Dhabi the value of the number plate went up depending on how low the digit was.

The UK sneaks in one lowly entry in the eigth position for ‘F 1’ bought by Afzal Khan of Bradford.

Registration	Country	£
1	Abu Dhabi	£7.25 million
5	Abu Dhabi	£3.5 million
7	Abu Dhabi	£1.58 million
18	Hong Kong	£1.56 million
9	Hong Kong	£832,258
2	Hong Kong	£608,115
33	Hong Kong	£448,085
F 1	UK	£440,625
M 1	UK	£331,500
8	Hong Kong	£320,128

Drug dealer puts his number plate in it

I’d like to start of by saying I don’t know much truth there is in this story as it’s a few years old now, so please take it with a pinch of salt!

Apparently a few years ago a resident of South London purchased the car registration ‘1 E’ for a hefty sum. This number plate was then transferred to his rather large Range Rover. He then used this vehicle as his mobile drug dealing office! A good way of using number plates to advertise your business I suppose.

Police were tipped off about his illicit activities and soon caught up with him. They apprehended him in his vehicle along with a considerable amount of narcotics.

Number Plate Designs

Why oh why do British number plates have to be sooo boring?

Check out this for a design from Florida:

How nice does that look?

OK, I'm not really one for horses either, but I think it gets the point across. All the US states have nice-looking number plates which tell you something about the area they're from.

But no, not us. All we're allowed is a tiny little "GB" logo in the corner. Anything else, and you risk failing your MOT test!

Come on DVLA, let us have some fun and have some 'pretty' designs on our number plates and make driving just that little bit more fun!

Number Plate Spotting

I was driving to work today, as you do, and got bored. So I decided to spot number plates. It's early days, but I did see a couple of cherished number plates.

The first one I saw was LAM 6Y (Lamby, I guess. Alan Lamb, perhaps?!) which I believe was on a BMW Z3.

Then I saw MA02 GOT. This could easily have just been a standard DVLA number plate but I think it was actually one the driver had paid for, trying to spell MAGGOT in the process. Bizarrely, this was also on a BMW.

And that was all for today. But I shall be keeping my eyes peeled!