Courtesy car of EDMQ
As you can see, words don’t fit well into that system but you can have probably every ICAO aircraft type designator on your number plate. Apart from the example above I remember only one obvious aviation reference: A Ford Mustang with …P51.
Whilst leaving Bruntingthorpe back in 2013 after watching the last ever VC10 landing, I followed a car with the plate “VC10 BYE”. Very apt of course!
Dimme wrote:
that sounds like another version of the NULL plate:
Will that throw a “seg fault error” on ticketing officer PDAs or Tablets?
One often have mannerisms that you are unaware of.
For years, I used to innocently ask my students whether anyone Is up “for a flight”?
When I retired they presented me with the following number plate:
Peter wrote:
It’s interesting that Germany changes the plate when you sell the car.
It’s not a legal requirement per se, but customary. Up until a few years ago, it was mandatory to have the license plate of your district/city of residence. So if the buyer of a used car came from a different district, they’d have to get a new plate anyways. Nowadays you do not always have to re-register when moving, but not everyone knows this. By and large, you can still tell where a German comes from by looking at their number plate.
My first car had three different plates over the time I owned it, first the seller’s (for just one day), then that of my parent’s district (where I was still registered at the time) and then of the East Frisian district where I moved and got my PPL :) At our last move, we used the new policy that allows us to keep the plate, thus we have two cars with East Frisian number plates driving around the Hannover region. It comes in handy if you mess up while driving, because the other drivers assume you are from some rural backwater instead of the state capital and thus don’t know where you’re going 
The plate is also bound to a car insurance policy. So if you kept the plate upon buying a car, both you and the seller would have to inform your respective insurance companies immediately, and always involve the local Department of Motor Vehicles (applicable for any sale)
To get an out of sequence plate (like e.g. C4VOK which is a “standard series” but from c. 1985) costs £200; same as any other. Probably there aren’t many of them left. See e.g. here.
I think those long lists advertised are currently on cars being driven and the owners are looking for offers. The dealers won’t own them because there are many listed which are massively expensive. For the short ones, which are all very old (apparently starting 1903) see e.g. here. Examples
I believe you can ask for anything you like (at some cost, which is not trivial but isn’t related to the content of the plate) but the response to every request is going to be ‘already registered’ or ‘not allowed’.
If you do a bit of googling it’s apparent that there are many, many dealers/traders who sit on hundreds/thousands of registrations in the hope that someone will for some reason want to pay a premium for them.
The whole thing baffles me a bit.
unless I changed the spacing
Around when I bought my present car, 2012, articles appeared in the UK press saying the DfT was going to abandon the spacing requirements. The rest (font, size, etc) were to remain. Then nothing appeared to happen… my enquiries (I work above a car dealership) suggested this was never implemented. I drive a “non regulation spaced” example (aviation theme, of course 
) and never got picked up for it. Arguably I never have anybody behind me for long but where I park it there are countless police cars refuelling and …
the UK system is as @Silvaire described for the US.
I don’t think so. You cannot make up plates anymore. Not since the 1960s or so and possibly the 1930s – see the wiki link above.
Over past decades the UK had occassional restrictions on trading plates, keeping them on non-roadworthy vehicles, etc, imposed only by left wing governments, but they were always removed soon afterwards, presumably because half the govt officials drive around in Jags, Bentleys, etc, with fancy plates which had a lot of money locked up in them
It’s interesting that Germany changes the plate when you sell the car.
