Doctor Who Number Plate Launched By DVLA

The DVLA is calling out to Doctor Who fans as it promotes its latest number plate sale, offering ‘Who 63’ for sale to Whovians with deep pockets.

Whatever your opinion on personalised number plates, it’s big business not just for purveyors of registration numbers, but for the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) too.
Each year the DVLA holds sales to flog number plates no longer, or never in, circulation to raise a few bob, with prices ranging from a few hundred pounds to over £500k for ’25 O’.

So with the latest number plate sale due to run from 22-24 November, DVLA are promoting it with what they think is the perfect plate for a Doctor Who fan – or Whovian – with the sale of ‘WHO 63’.

It might not quite be the ‘WHO 1’ famed for being on John Pertwee’s Doctor Who car, but it does denote the year Doctor Who first aired (1963) and will go under the hammer almost exactly 54 years to the day Doctor Who first aired at 5.15pm on 23 November 1963.

But it’s not just Doctor Who fans being enticed to buy a new number plate, with Manchester football fans wooed with ‘M17 CTY’ and MA17 ‘UTD’, and potential buyers who are desperate to tell the world their name (or an approximation) with ‘DOU 9G’ and PA11 DDY’, amongst others.

"It is a historic and highly significant number for us because it is the symbol of the establishment of the UAE which was created on December 2," he was quoted as saying by a Russian-language business daily published in Moscow. The auction saw fierce competition between bidders hailing from all community segments.

The popular auction generated a revenue of more than $15m. 60 distinguished Abu Dhabi number plates were auctioned at Emirates Palace hotel. Abu Dhabi Police, in cooperation with Emirates Auction, held the public auction on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the country's establishment.

The auction listed the numbers on the company's website, including five double-digit plates, 15 three-digit plates, 19 four-digit and 17 five-digit plates. Fancy numbers like 10, 60, 333, 600, 999, 1000, 1111, 5050, 6000, 6060, 6666, 9090, 9999, 10000, 55555, 60000, 66666 were also sold at high numbers at the event attended by 800 people from across the region.

In November, an Emirati businessman who bought the car plate Number 1 for Dhs 31m at an auction in Abu Dhabi was charged with fraud after his cheque bounced.

Emirates Auction has announced that it will hold a public auction for 50 distinguished vehicle number plates for Ajman on Saturday, 25th of November, at the Bahi Ajman Palace Hotel.

Emirates Auction said that all the numbers available are from category 'H' which is being offered for the first time in Ajman and will be available for sale exclusively through auctions. The numbers available include one single-digit number plate bearing the number '2' and four double-digit plates, as well as 14 three-digit, 14 four-digit, and 17 five-digit number plates.

Abdulla M. AlMannaei, Chairman and Managing Director of Emirates Auction, said that he expected the auction to witness a huge turnout from enthusiasts.

How close a series of letters or numbers are to a real name of word: if the match quality is high (and the numbers and letters are very convincing in making a popular word), the value of the registration plate will be higher. This means that a match like 5IMON, for the name Simon, will be worth a lot more than a more obscure set of letters and numbers that are not as convincing a match, such as S17 MMM for the name Sam.

The style of the plate: this means establishing if it is a new-style plate, an older-style format or if it is dateless or Irish, for instance. Other options are that it is a prefix-style plate or a suffix-style plate. New-style number plates, which have been produced since 2001, tend to be the least valuable because they are a bit less appealing to some collectors, plus the rule about not having plates that are newer than your car can also come into play, putting people off from buying a newer-style plate for their older car. Prefix-style number plates, which were in production between 1983 and 2001 can be more popular as more vehicles are entitled to have those licence numbers, and they may have fewer characters in total. Suffix-style plates, issued from 1963 to 1983 are relatively rare, which means they can attract higher prices than prefix-style plates and newer designs. Dateless number plates, also known as cherished number plates, were produced between 1903 and 1963 and are nearly always the most valuable number plate configurations; they have fewer digits and their dateless nature means that people can hide the age of their car. Irish number plates are similar to dateless number plates, especially because they don’t have a year identifier. They also tend to be cheaper than other types of vehicle registration plates.

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