A Brief History on why you should take a number plate check

 

These days, when you intend to identify a vehicle, the first thing that you would do is the number plate check. It might have become common now, but it has not always been the same. The act of allocating an individual number to a vehicle began in the United Kingdom only in 1903 under the Motor Car act. Even prior to the UK, there were countries that followed the system of allocating numbers to vehicles.

It is stated that France was the first country to allot individual number plates for cars in 1893.In the United Kingdom, it was initially started in 1903. When the number allotment began, it began with a single digit. It was very easy to spot a vehicle with the registration number. Hence, back in those days, there was no need for a number plate finder.

On the contrary, in these days, if intended to know the information about the vehicle, the government can use an online portal. The information is provided by Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA).This method is known as the registration plate check. Few information that can be obtained from this portal are Vehicle tax, MOT expiry, Year of manufacturing, Type of engine and so on.

When it comes to the series of the numbers given to the vehicles, initially it began with an alphabet and a number that is the first vehicle that was given plate number was given A1 as the registration number. Whereas as years passed, the number of vehicles kept on increasing in an unimaginable way, hence they had to come up with an alternate ways to give individual identification to each vehicle. That is when they started using permutation and combination in providing individual numbers to vehicles.

Initially, the number plates given were dateless which means with those plate numbers you would not be able to find out the year of registration. This was the situation between 1903 and 1963. An update had been brought by 1963 as they had run out of number to allot to vehicles. This is when the suffix system came into existence. In this system, a letter has been added at the end of the plate to denote the year of the registration.

An upgrade from the suffix system is the prefix system. In this, instead of adding a letter at the end of the plate, an alphabet to indicate the year has been added in the beginning of the plate. It began with ‘A’ indicating the year 1983, B indicating 1984, and so on. An upgrade from prefix system is the system that is in existence these days. It is named as current style, and was introduced in 2001.

The current style is made up of 3 parts, such as Local region, Date ID, and Random Letters. Local region indicates where the vehicle was registered, Date ID indicates the date of registration of the vehicle, and Random indicates the random last 3 letters that are uniquely provided for each vehicle.

Despite the efforts made by the government in providing the individual plate numbers for the security of each vehicle, the fraudsters misused the plate numbers in hiding the true identity of a vehicle.  In order to overcome this issue, there came a process to find out the history of the vehicle which is named as number plate history check. Through this, the information about the history of plate change can be found out, and used in cross checking the sellers and dealers. Hence, with the knowledge on all these information, a person would be able to confidently buy a used vehicle.