The sight of a new registration on the road means some lucky driver has a brand-new car. There are two issues each year, one in March and one in September and each one is eagerly anticipated.
Since 1963, it has always been possible to establish when a particular combination was issued because of certain identifying characters. For example, the ‘F’ suffix at the end of this plate places it between 1 August 1967 and 31 July 1968:
ABC 123F
Conversely, it is the opening ‘Y’ prefix which dates this later instance as between 1 March 2001 and 31 August 2001:
Y123 ABC
The current style of registrations uses numbers as the code for the date. Thus, the infix ‘23’ tells us that this example was issued between 1 March and 31 August 2023:
AB23 ABC
It’s easy to check the age of any registration of the above formats using the tables on our car registration years page.
Disguise
While it’s not generally a problem, except perhaps with very new registrations, you have to be a bit careful to avoid one that would make your car look younger than it actually is. This rule was introduced to prevent unscrupulous second-hand car dealers from disguising the age of used cars.
If you are somewhat coy about the actual age of your car, the answer is to hide it altogether with a ‘dateless’ plate.
In the old days; ‘during the war’ (literally!) and both before and after (until 1963), none of the letters and numbers related to the date of issue. The clue is in the presence of an opening or closing digit:
ABC 123123 ABC
’Dateless’ plates are brilliant since they can be assigned to any vehicle without any danger of failing the age rule. As you might expect, these historic combinations - now all at least 60 years old and some even approaching 120 years(!) - are highly desirable investments and command a premium.
But you don’t need to break the law - or the bank - to protect your modesty with our range of ‘Irish’ ‘three by four’ plates. These always include a letter ‘I’ or ‘Z’ but are modestly priced and do exactly the same job:
AIG 444WAZ 2222
A word in your ear
The date codes we talked about earlier are, in fact, far less conspicuous when registrations resemble names or words, like those in our illustrations below. You would probably be quite happy to display one of these excellent but ‘dated’ plates even on a brand-new car.
BUT 7ONJ3 RRYSU54 NNA
Quite interesting
Whilst very rare on our roads, you may have seen or heard tales of the almost mythical ‘Q’ plates. The letter ‘Q’ has never been used in standard registrations, since it looks too much like an ‘O’. But, in cases where it proves impossible to establish the age of a vehicle e.g. a kit car or an import, the DVLA may assign a registration beginning with this, otherwise, spare character.
Images 'Fastest Shed' by 'DeFacto' & 'Q plate on a construction vehicle' by '!MNc99' licenced under CC by 4.0
DAT 3D is also available for purchase in the panel below.
