OT: How to find the country by car registration number?

[Commander Kinsey]

If I was to type in SA 7698 K into a website, it could tell me what country that vehicle is registered in. Is there such a web site?

[Dean Hoffman]

[Commander Kinsey]

That is for VINs, not registration numbers. I want something to find the number you see on the foot long plate on each end of the car, for example F 285 TLM should find a 1988 Beige Rover Maestro registered in the UK, but now scrapped (my first car). Not sure why everyone keeps talking about VINs, I clearly said registration number.

[hubops]

In my part of the world, a person would normally transfer the plate < registration> to his new car. The province of registration would remain the same but it could <historically> apply to numerous vehicles. The province of registration is prominently displayed on the plate - along with the motto ... Ontario's motto was once

Ontario x x x x x x Yours To Discover

A clever person bought the vanity plate GIRLS :-) John T.

[David Brooks]

Like this?

HTH (but UK only)

[Commander Kinsey]

I should have gone to University there:

[Commander Kinsey]

That is my first car, doesn't seem to say much, like it's been scrapped 20 years ago.

I wasn't after precise details of a car, just to find what country it's from when I see the car in a photograph. In particular SA 7698 K

[Chris Green]

I would have thought that there's no absolute guarantee that any particular number is unique across countries. A car registration is only intended to be unique in one country, that's (partly) why there is a requirement to have a country identification of some sort when you take your car abroad.

[David Brooks]

Thank you for sharing!

I once married a girl with a body like that! :-D

[David Brooks]

SA used to be Saudi Arabia (That's now KSA - Kingdom of Saudi Arabia)

See here for all you could ever want to know!

This is why I make a contribution to Wikipedia every year! ;-)

[Colin Bignell]

The format can also vary, even within one country:

[micky]

I doubt there is one site for that. YOu might have to check out each country for that format. 200 countries. Plus I can imagine that two countries use the same format. IIRC, Maryland has two different formats, just to make things harder.

[rbowman]

I believe in the US plates are only unique on a state by state basis. In this state the first digit tells you which county the vehicle was registered in but that doesn't work for vanity plates.

The plate design sometimes lets you tell the state at a glance but that's not guaranteed.

[Scott Lurndal]

Upon information and belief, I'd recommened wikipedia.

[Commander Kinsey]

What did she see in you? :-P

[Commander Kinsey]

Ah but if you look at one of their examples,

That is Estonia, but you only know that from the EST on the left. That's a new EU thing. America has aways had the state on the plate too, but I'm thinking of plates where all you would see in their example would be 622 MHT. What do I do with that? I can always tell a dutch plate, because they look like BP-LH-40. Unusual to have three sets of two characters, seperated by a hyphen instead of a space.

[Commander Kinsey]

I wasn't looking for a guarantee, just a website where I could type in the plate and it would say that's the format used in X and Y countries.

[NY]

My first thought on seeing 622 MHT is that it is a pre-1963 GB plate: when the local authorities had exhausted their "ABC 123" reg numbers, they started to reverse them as "123 ABC" or even "1234 BC". But I imagine those formats are fairly common throughout Europe (and other parts of the world).

Our present "AB12 CDE" format may be less common elsewhere in the world. The Irish Republic has a similar format that encodes the year "05-D-12345" is a Dublin plate for 2005. I think they used "95-D-12345" for 1995, so there will come a time when a 1995 plate has to be disambiguated from a 2095 plate - if any 100-year-old cars are on the road ;-) Since 2013, they use

131 and 132 to denote 2013 Jan-Jun and 2013 Jul-Dec respectively (*). Northern Ireland is a law until itself: ABC 1234 where one of the letters is always an I (prohibited in GB plates because it looks like a digit 1). As I understand it, there is no coding of the year of registration.

(*) Interesting that they choose one of the changeover dates to be 1 January. GB quickly abandoned that, in the mid 60s, because they found that there was an unexpected (really???) demand for new cars just after the car industry was returning from Christmas holidays. I'm surprised that this peak was not expected: human nature is that people want a car that has the new reg number as soon as it becomes available, and so will delay ordering a car so they get a K suffix on 1 August rather than a J suffix on 31 July or the modern equivalent: 72 (1 September 2022 onwards) rather than 22 (until the end of August 2022).

[Colin Bignell]

On 13/10/2022 18:50, Commander Kinsey wrote: ...

Although, since 2006, they have been using different combinations of one, two and three characters, separated by hyphens, with private vehicle currently being in the format A-000-AA and HGVs 00-AAA-0.

  >

[Commander Kinsey]

And yet we don't prohibit O and 0.

When I saw something like SO52 FGC, a 2002 plate, I thought it was S 052 FGC, the old S plate.

They also ban things like BNP in private registrations, unless you got one before they banned it :-)

They also ban anything they think looks like a rude word, pathetic really.

Yeah there are sad people about. M'colleague was one. She bought a car with the absolute new reg on it the day they changed over, then when it was a year old, put her private plate back on.