Greg Hennessy wrote:
On Thu, 19 Feb 2004 10:42:35 GMT, "Richard J."
wrote:
Taking up nearly 60% of each and every plate issued is bad design
IMHO.

You're implying that it needs only 3 characters to identify the
vehicle.

Where did I imply that. A vehicle is *uniquely* identified from the
26^3 combination of the 3 character remainder, not the 4 characters
wasted on a static year / registration office. Thats only ~17.5k odd
combinations which one must assume a busy registration office would
easily consume in a matter of days/weeks. Especially with bulk
registrations from fleet buyers.

Common sense would dictate that a combination of

2 digit Year
[A-Z0-9] registration location
4 Character Base36 unique ID,

would generate nearly 1.7 million unique registrations in comparison

But that's still 7 characters, and it doesn't cope with the 40 DVLA
offices identified in the current system, which the DVLA presumably
finds convenient. So why is it better?

Personally I consider the issue of yearly plates to be silly.

Giving each license holder his own plate for life would have solved
the problem once and for all.

What is this "problem" that you are so concerned about?

Unnecessarily wasting taxpayers money.

The number of vehicles and licensed drivers on the roads is relatively
fixed when compared to the open ended number to keep track in the
current system.

I assume you mean owners rather than drivers, otherwise your scheme
doesn't work for commercial vehicles at all. But I'm still not clear
how you would save money. When a car was first assigned to an owner, it
would need to be registered against that owner's personal number
(assuming a tidy situation where he had just got rid of his previous car
and could therefore reuse the number). It would then have to be
re-registered when sold to another owner. Where is the saving?
--
Richard J.
(to e-mail me, swap uk and yon in address)