Reg Plate Auction - Day 3 News - £63,500 for 1 OOO

The third day of the DVLA cherished number plate auction is underway with a bang!

the registration plate 1 OOO has been sold to a telephone bidder for the sum of £63,500 hammer price!

The UK's most expensive number plate to date is the F1 registration number purchased by a British businessman for £440,625 in 2008, though that's just small change compared to the £7m spent by Abu Dhabi-based Saeed Khouri on the 1 number plate - officially the largest sum of money ever spent on a registration number.

The first series of number plates were issued in 1903 and ran until 1932, using the series A 1 to YY 9999. The letter or pair of letters indicated the local authority in whose area the vehicle was registered, for example A - London, B - Lancashire, C - West Riding of Yorkshire. In England and Wales the letter codes were initially allocated in order of population size (by the 1901 census) whilst Scotland and Ireland had their own sequences incorporating the letters S" and "I" respectively, which were allocated alphabetically: IA = Antrim, IB = Armagh, etc. When a licensing authority reached 9999, it was allocated another two letter mark, but there was no pattern to these subsequent allocations as they were allocated on a first come first served basis. There are three interesting anomalies where a zero has been issued - The Lord Provost of Edinburgh has S 0 and his Glasgow counterpart has G 0 while the official car of the Lord Provost of Aberdeen has RG 0. In addition the Lord Mayor

In 1963, numbers were running out once again, and an attempt was made to create a national scheme to alleviate the problem. The three letter, up to three number system was kept, but a letter suffix was added, which changed every year. In this scheme, numbers were drawn from the range AAA 1A to YYY 999A for the first year, then AAA 1B to YYY 999B for the second year, and so on. Some areas did not adopt the year letter for the first two years, sticking to their own schemes, but in 1965 adding the year letter was made compulsory. As well as yielding many more available numbers, it was a handy way for vehicle buyers to know the age of the vehicle immediately. At first the year letter changed on 1 January every year, but car retailers started to notice that buyers would tend to wait until the New Year for the new letter to be issued, so that they could get a newer" car. This led to major peaks and troughs in sales over the year, and to help flatten this out somewhat the industry lobbied