How To Fit New Number Plates To Your Vehicle

You don't have to be a mechanic to replace the number plates on your vehicle. Whether you are fitting new ones or replacing broken, lost or stolen ones, this article will guard you through the process from start to finish.

There will usually be just two scenarios where you find yourself needing to change a number plate on a vehicle. Firstly, exchanging an existing one and secondly, replacing a broken, lost or stolen one. In either case you will need very few tools and very little technical expertise.

Before you start keep in mind that the front number plate is the white one and the yellow one goes on the back (That sounds obvious, I know, but its a surprisingly easy mistake to make). Also that if you are replacing your original number plates with a personalized registration then before you fit the new plates to your car you must assign the registration to the vehicle. If you don t then the registration is not legal and you could end up with a fine and points on your license.

To assign the registration you must fill out the appropriate parts of the V750 certificate and then send it or take it in person with the required documents to your nearest D.V.L.A. Local Office. The sections of the certificate to be filled in will depend upon your particular circumstances. A step by step explanation of all these sections, as seen on the back of the V750 certificate, can be found in the Regfinder.net Help Index under the heading of Ordering a Number Plate from D.V.L.A. and you will find details of your nearest D.V.L.A. Local Office in the Got a Question? pages of the D.V.L.A. website.


(Scenario 1)
Exchanging your existing number plate.


You will need:

1. A cordless or electric drill

2. A 4mm to 6mm drill bit

3. A Philip s screw driver


Doing the Job:

1. Remove the original plate from the vehicle (Pop open the plastic caps and undo the screws)

2. Place the original plate exactly on top of the new one and drill holes in the new one using the original number plate holes as a template.

3. Screw new number plate to the vehicle using the original holes in the bumper (Don t forget to put the plastic caps on the screws first).


(Scenario 2)
Replacing your broken, lost or stolen number plate.
(If you don’t have the original one to use as a template)


You will need:

1; A cordless or electric drill

2; A 4mm to 6mm drill bit

3; A Philip's screw driver

4. A small amount of grease or anything of that texture (jam will do)


Doing the Job:

1; Unscrew the old plates. (or find placement screws if lost or stolen)

2; Put the old screws back in (without the plastic cap).

3; Put a blob of grease’ or jam on the screw heads.

4; Offer up the new number plate centrally until it touches the two screw heads.

5; Remove the screws.

6; Carefully, drill the new plates where the grease blobs appear. Remember you will be drilling from the back of the number plate so don t apply too much pressure or you may damage the front as the drill bit goes through.

7; Screw the new plate on. (Don t forget to put the plastic caps on the screws first).


If you re still uncertain about this process then its probably a better idea to go down to your local mechanic or car body shop and offer one of the lads 20 pounds to fit the number plates for you. It should only take him half an hour and you will probably find that he will supply any new plastic caps or screws that may be required.

Reg

Why Number Plate And Registration Dealers Are Expensive

Of course, we d all like a personal registration mark like the recently sold F1 plate but for most of us, the 440,000 pounds price tag would prove a little prohibitive. So, the trick, when searching for a private plate, is to find a good one that nobody knows exists but everyone would want if they did.

The D.V.L.A. is without doubt or exception the best value provider of UK personalized number plates there is. No one else can realistically compete because the D.V.L.A. creates them all in the first place. It is the only place you will ever find a genuine bargain. If you can find one, that is.

With a stock list often in excess of 30 million registrations you could spend the rest of your life trying to find words, names or phrases within it when most of the time you re not really sure what you re looking for until you see it, and when most of the number plates don t make a word, anyway.

Even if you had the time and patience for a task of this scale, the D.V.L.A. stock is in perpetual flux, selling between 500 & 1000 number plates every day with millions more being added every 6 months. Its not that surprising then, that most people either give up the search completely or turn to one of the many privately run, after market, registration plate dealers currently operating.

Private dealers mostly offer a good service but can never offer the best value. They make their money by marking up the product which in itself would not seem too unreasonable. Every business needs to make a profit, however some of the top dealers need to spend 50,000 pounds a week on advertising before they do. This money has to come from somewhere.

An example of this pricing is the registration mark: UP51ART. I bought this registration from the D.V.L.A. for 799 pounds after finding it by default using the, then manual, Regfinder algorithm and realized I had to be on to something as it had been available on the D.V.L.A. website for nearly 3 years without anyone else noticing it. You don t have to look very far in the private dealers advertisements to see that most 7 letter word number plates of this caliber are on sale for at least 10k.

Knowing that with the Regfinder.net system I could find thousands of such registrations I briefly thought my day job would soon be a thing of the past. But its not that simple. I have contacted most of the private traders regarding UP51ART over the years and been offered fixed contract prices of between 1200 and 216 pounds. Needless to say UP51ART is staying in my possession for the foreseeable future.

It could always have been worse, though. I could have bought UP51ART from one of these companies for 10,000 pounds and then been told the fixed price that they would be willing to guarantee me for it if I wanted them to sell it for me again.

All of this lead to the decision to build Regfinder.net. The number plate search engine. Now, Instead of manually trawling through the whole D.V.L.A. registration number stock with pen and paper we have turned the idea into an algorithmic database that is updated daily for everyone to use and have found over 200,000 words and names in as many different ways possible.

To date, Regfinder.net has found, categorized, availability checked and price checked over 30 million readable registration marks starting from A at the beginning of the prefix plates up to 13 in the current style, most of which are still available or will be in the future. Regfinder.net links you directly to your registration of choice on the D.V.L.A. website. All of the available personalized number plates found on Regfinder.net are bought directly by the user from the D.V.L.A. for the D.V.L.A. price.

Unlike all the private dealers Regfinder.net does not mark up the D.V.L.A. prices, nor does it receive any form of payment from the D.V.L.A. or any of the private companies. This project was started with a Robin Hood style design remit in mind and we believe that everyone who uses this service will be so pleased, they will tell others about it. Word of mouth will be the only advertising we will need.

Reg

A Jeremy Clarkson Rap...!

How long did it take him to make that!?

Reg

Reg Plate Sprays Have Got'm Worried?

It seems that flash reflection sprays for number plates have got the Road Policing Unit a bit nervous.
( Click Here to read article.)

Hmm.. I'm not sure if it's illegal to sell/buy/use these sprays?
In which case we have another 'Grey Area'

Reg

DVLA Marks Returned to Availability

As regular readers will know, we update Reg on a 'daily' basis and that lately the DVLA have taken to returning some random personalised number plates to availability.
(possibly ones they couldn't sell at auction but don't quote me...)
Where possible (space permitting) we're gonna stick'em up on the blog for you.
(Cos we're nice like that)
Anyway, here's the latest batch.
Enjoy.

Reg

F1 BRO- £1565
F3 RET- £980
G11 BSN- £1275
MO07 OWN- £980
T3 NTH- £1275
WO07 ONS- £3520
W111 LKE- £1275
CA55 KEY- £2250

The Grey Area of Number Plate Tax

I’m sure that I won’t be surprising anyone when I say that we are currently living through one of the worst financial down turns in the history of capitalism.
Nor will anyone be surprised to hear that this crisis was largely brought about by our government’s mismanagement of financial regulation.
We’ve all seen the CEOs of preposterously large banks serving up PR spun platitudes to the Select Committee, usually stating words to the effect of: “Yeah, sorry about all the mess but it really was more your fault than mine.... Can I have my £750,000 p/a pension now?”

We know that, after losing all our money, we now have to pay out to keep these banks and insurance companies afloat when simultaneously they are no longer paying the billions in taxes each year to the treasury that they once were and that on top of this, Education, Health Care, Defence, Infrastructure, Civil Servants and their pensions and the £40million a day that it costs us to stay in Europe all still have to be paid for on a hand to mouth basis.
We know all this and we know all about the Stealth Taxes that will now be routinely imposed on us by a Government ever more desperate to balance the books.

So, armed with all this knowledge, I don’t know why I find myself surprised and dismayed at the grey areas starting to emerge in the Governments latest round of Stealth Taxes.

I’ve just been reading an article on the Directgov website about the fine for not wearing a seatbelt whilst driving, being raised from £30 to £60.
Snuck into this announcement is a small, incidental mention of misrepresented number plates also being subject to the same fine increase.

At first glance this may not seem too important until you consider how the vast majority of these misrepresented number plates came to be on vehicles in the first place.

The Prefix Style Registration System was launched in 1983, by which time the Government had become very aware of the resale value of vehicle registrations and so decided to withhold the numbers 1 to 20 from all the registration sequences (A1 AAA to A20 YYY) in the hope of selling them later. They continued to do this until August 1991 (J reg) when they decided to withhold a few other sequences between 20 and 999.
DVLA Personalised Registrations first started selling number plates to the public in around 1990.

Again this is nothing to get excited about. Customers are advised on the DVLA website that:- If you intend purchasing a DVLA registration to misrepresent it on your number plate, we would rather you did not buy.
So that (rather tenuously) would cover them against any misunderstandings.
It all starts to get a little fishy, however, when you take into account how they price these number plates.

The DVLA sell somewhere between 500 and 1000 registrations every single day via their website for between £245 and about £4000 making the Government a mean average of £80 million a year. That figure doesn’t include the auctions that are held several times a year where they offer registrations they believe to be worth more than £4K.
Not a bad result at all for a product that costs them next to nothing to produce.
Because the cheaper registrations are usually bought for the last three letters, spelling out either initials or a short name, the buyer is less inclined to misrepresent the number plates. The problem begins when whole or nearly whole words can be found within registrations which almost forces the purchaser to misrepresent the number plate.
This forced misrepresentation is brought about by the fact that the more DE51RED and CL05SER the word accuracy, the more the DVLA charge for a registration which in turn means, the more likely it is that the purchaser will misrepresent the number plate to get their money’s worth.
(If you’d bought the registration F1 ASH from the DVLA for £6600 how tempted would you be to close that gap when you had the number plates made?)

The DVLA has an average of 30 million registrations for sale at any given time so it’s not easy to spot examples of this price structuring on their open sales data base but if you go into DVLA Auctions from their home page and then into Previous Prices Achieved it becomes a lot easier to see.
(I typed F1 into the search bar and got 178 matches, all of which need some form of misrepresentation)

So, my question is this; can it be right that one Government agency is knowingly selling a product to the public that another Government agency will fine them for owning at a later date?
If yes then surely this amounts to confidence trickery or at very least the entrapment of 500 to 1000 people per day?
If no then the Government needs to decide whether it wants to sell personalised registrations or fine people for owning them.

Some of you may see all this simply as desperate times calling for desperate measures and others as just plain old cynical greed. Most of you, being less interested in personalised registrations, will probably decide that you couldn’t care less and the few of you with that irrational, Clarkson like, phobia of private number plates will actually be glad that they are being persecuted.
All of that aside though, there are a couple of points I’m sure we can all agree on. Firstly, if a private company were implementing this kind of confidence trick whilst conducting its business, we would hope that it would be brought before the Judge as quickly as possible (banks and insurance companies excluded of course) and secondly, if the Government are using this tactic successfully on one form of stealth tax, you can more or less guarantee they’ll be using it elsewhere.

Reg

Reg's new addition; The History of Number Plates

We've just added some new pages to our Help Index.
'The History of Number Plates' contains tables and charts of useful information about "all" aspects of UK and global number plates including;

Global Number Plate Systems

Guernsey Number Plates

Jersey Number Plates

Isle of Man Number Plates

Military Number Plates

Trade Number Plates

Irish Number Plates & ID Tags

Dateless Number Plate ID Tags

Current Style Number Plate ID Tags

Diplomatic Registrations

Embassy Codes

Suffix Plates Issue Dates

Prefix Plates Issue Dates

Current Style Plates Issue Dates

Withheld Prefix Number Plate Sequences

Number Plate Crime

Number Plate Size, Font & Colour Schemes

Total DVLA Number Plate Sales


I think we've covered everything but if anyone can think of something we've omitted, please let us know.

Cheers

Reg