"Jean-Francois Dancre" wrote in message
...
]
Mrs Redboots a écrit :

We're actually the oddity in that respect. France has plates which
change
whenever it's re-registered into a different department. Germany's
similar.

France's laws change in 2008, when they will no longer have regional
plates but a format of AA 123 AA, where AA are 2 letters & 123 are 3
numbers. I believe drivers who wish to do so *may* have a regional or
departmental indicator to the right of their number-plate; an "F" in
European stars to the left will be (I think) compulsory. No
personalisation will be possible - you will have to take what you get.

Indeed. This is exactly what I intended to post, only you did it first and
put it better :-) .

I might just add that scooters are already registered with the new
numbering, and have been since January 2004 (their plates are of the form
A 123 A [note the single letter at the beginning and the end], to be
extended if/when new plates are needed with the A 123 AA and A 123 AAA
series).


Are Great Britain and the Irish Republic (but not Northern Ireland) very
much in the minority among countries throughout the world in still encoding
the place and year of registration into the registration number? It seems
such an eminently sensible thing for a registration plate to contain
*information* rather than just being a random number that I'm surprised all
countries don't do it. Apparently when the A 123 ABC format in GB was about
to come to the end of its life, the police strongly recommended to the DVLA
that future schemes such as the present AA 12 AAA format should still encode
place and date, because it was often the only thing about a registration
number that witnesses would remember if they glimpsed a car being involved
in an offence - presumably subconsciously they remembered the parts that
actually meant something.

I hadn't realised that some European countries had a system whereby the
registration number was owned by the person, not the car. Does that mean
that when a person passes his driving test and buys his first car, he gets
allocated a number (somewhat akin to a social security number?) that he uses
on all his successive cars throughout his life? Their equivalent of the DVLA
must be kept very busy recording all the changes of registration number
applied to cars as they are bought and sold.

It always intrigues me to look at other countries' ways of solving problems
(especially if I think our way of doing it is better!!) - in America, France
and Germany, someone obviously made a conscious decision that it was a good
idea to change a car's registration number whenever the car changed hands,
rather than either the car keeping the same number throughout its life or
else the driver keeping the same number throughout his life.