Why do people still buy personalised number plates?

Because they are t*ssers obsessed with bragging about the size of their penises/vaginae.

Edited by brum on 06/05/2013 at 20:10

A Dyson was/is far better than those crappy bagged vacuums, but a personlised plate is just a re-arangement of letters of a piece of plastic. A better analogy would be a HOOVER that costs updward of £150 more because it says 5UCK3R on it instead of HOOVER.

A fool and money are easily parted.

Why did people buy Dyson vacuum cleaners? because Dyson convinced them that their existing, perfctly functional hoovers were somehow inadequate and that their lives would be improved immeasurably by purchasing a vacuum cleaner with no bag.

Result: Dyson is a multi millionaire; his customers aren't!

Some of them will be millionaires.

To be fair those Dysons are actually quite good, but then my previous hoover was far from perfectly functional...

It really isn't a moral issue, or one to get angry about.

Not at all! Perhaps the anonymity of a normal number plate isn't always a good thing. If my number plate was my name, would I drive differently?! Maybe....!

The industry surrounding cherished plates is a bit depressing, but the concept is harmless enough.

Personally I bought one (£250) ten years ago to stop my car from ageing, which for the 5 years the model was current it did. With the introduction of six monthly updates of registration plates your considerable investment can date very quickly.

I've never pratted around with the spacing or fonts as its purely a J prefix one digit and my intitials. I still have it, a dealer will readily swap it as part of the deal on a replacement vehicle.

Seen in Viz magazine, many years ago, on the Helpful Tips page.

"Save money on expensive personalised number plates for your car. Change your name by deed poll instead.

Signed, G657 BDN"

Still makes me smile....

I have a personalised vacuum cleaner. It's called Henry.

I put the owners of NON-ORIGINAL registration marks in three buckets:

1) The owner is ‘okay’ if the plate is amusing enough to raise a smile or a chuckle from me.

2) The owner is ‘okay’ if a pretty-standard reg number (like one of the “A”-prefix plates) is being used on an older Audi/BMW/Merc model (their shapes tend to evolve relatively slowly) so that it’s difficult to pin-down the actual age of the car. This makes it easier outside the school for a mum’s car to be ‘acceptable’ to the other mums who bought theirs brand new. This elicits a smile+nod+wink from me: It’s like “I don’t actually want to be a member of your club, but I’ve suckered you into accepting me anyway – ha!”

3) All other cases: The owner is simply a show-off, plain and simple.

And the really annoying ones are those printed in a non-regulation font: The rest of us have to abide by a law which facilitates our plates to be read by ANPRs, so why aren’t you doing so? I can only conclude that you are both pretentious AND a criminal.

I once bought a Volvo S80 from the estate of a deceased neighbour whose daughter lived around the corner. The family are good friends and the original plate on the car was fairly unusual. The car itself was similar to others in the area (there are/were several metallic blue S80s around at the time).

I bought the car and replaced the plate with S80 *** (*** = my initials) so that the family would not feel the loss of their father each time they saw the car. I know it was appreciated and when I sold the car, the plate went with it.

We are not all prats, but I couldn't be bothered having one now.

I once owned OO 3273.