Private number plates: the best way to make your car your own

You can get all sorts of people buying private number plates with all sorts’ reasons for it too. The number one reason often heard time and time again is that individuals think they’re an amusing way of making their cars their own. The other facet is that it’s repeatedly imparted as a gift for a partner or family member and it’s an excellent way of reminding the receiver every time that they step into their car that somebody loves them too. It can be very heart-warming, especially for a new young family with a Dad who still wants to maintain his love for driving with kids.

Of course, when it’s described like that in such a way, it would be tough to have anything but helpful encouraging thoughts about the private number plate industry as a whole. This is backed up factually by the colossal £2 billion which has been raised by the DVLA since private number plates went on sale back in 1989, demonstrating that more than four million private individual registrations exist.

To put this in perspective, £2 billion at this time could just about pay for two M6 toll highways, 300 free schools or around 95,000 nurses. All of this revenue generated by something as simple as people proudly declaring to the road-using domain that they are whoever they want to be recognised as.

So why do people occasionally roll their eyes when they witness AMS1 (Alan Sugar), WAZ8 (Wayne Rooney) or MAG1C (Paul Daniels) on the streets? Well partially, it’s a throwback to the fact that private number plates boomed in attractiveness in the 80’s, a decade when bankers’ gluttony had turned the public’s opinion against obvious displays of affluence. Getting a private number plate was seen as something that was done by those with more money than sense, a rather tasteless, thing to do. But 25 years later, and with an equivalent social situation around, has that approach changed?

Well there definitely seems to have been a change in the way private plates are received. There was a time when they were understood as something of a novelty, but their endurance and the fact that they are more prevalent than ever proposes that the private number plate has outlasted that connotation with the 80’s and is now breaking new ground. Sales have increased by 5% every year, so clearly this isn’t something that’s going to go away anytime soon.

With over 10 years of experience in the number plate and show plate manufacturing market. Pro Plates have the skills, knowledge and the hardware to supply you the best quality plates that will last. We can produce any plate in any size using our image based online plate builder.