TESLA Number Plates To Be Sold
Reg Plates ArticleTESLA 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 popular any name or initial it contains is: You are more likely to get good money for a registration plate that spells out a name like 5UE than you are with a more unusual name, simply because there is more demand for Sue (or Dave or Mel) than there would be for Hector, Primrose or Zebedee
How valuable the letters and numbers the plate contains are: in terms of numbers, lower numbers with fewer digits tend to be the most valuable when reselling personalised number plates, making BOB 1 more valuable than BOB 379. Sequential numbers (123, 456 etc.) and repeated numbers (444, 88) are more popular than random combinations, and special occasion numbers like 18 and 21 can also boost a number plate’s value a little. In terms of the letters in a number plate, the likelihood of a series of letters being a name or a person’s initials increases the value of the plate, too.
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