TESLA Number Plates To Be Sold

en years ago Alex Ortega saw a story about Elon Musk. Elon had sold out of Paypal and was investing in a new business called Tesla. They were a year away from launching their first car – the Roadster. Alex knew Elon was onto something.

He couldn’t buy shares – a shame, he’d be a wealthy man right now – instead, he registered the Number Plate “TESLA” in New South Wales.

Kept in storage all these years, it’s cost Alex a lot of money every year – over $500 – to keep them, and now it’s time to move on and see if he can get a return from the investment.

Next month, on November 1 he will list the number plates on eBay starting at $1 with a reserve. When we spoke to Alex he wouldn’t reveal his reserve, only to say “over the years I’ve been offered a lot of money for them”.

When I suggested the market value of a name plate like that would be around $5,000 Alex was quick to reply “These are worth much more than that”. So you can expect a high reserve.

For any normal plate that’s a word you might fetch 5, possibly $10,000 – but Alex has something important on his side: Wealthy Tesla car owners.

A Tesla owner has forked out well over $200,000 for their car. Many already have vanity plates, relating to the environment or even TE5LA – but this is pretty special.

If wealthy Tesla owner Simon Hackett lived in NSW he’d be the perfect buyer (he lives in South Australia), but that won’t stop many looking closely at the Auction.

Kicking off on November 1, it will last 10 days.

Given the audience here, it’s possible, if not likely the plate will fetch over $20,000. We shall wait and see.

The actual plates are in storage at a Sydney Motor Registry to confirm the validity of Mr Ortega’s ownership.

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.

number plates reg transfers