There are lies, damned lies and registration statistics. For the moment though the motor trade is dancing gaily around the showroom potted plants in anticipation of the big pay days they will be getting on September 1st.
The thing is it used to be August 1st. High summer. High drama. High sales.
There were showroom parties. Midnight drive aways. Bunches of flowers and champers.
Getting the latest plate, spotting the latest plate, dreaming about the latest plate was a really big thing back in the bad old single month registration days.
Trouble was it concentrated almost everything into one frantic month. Pre delivery inspections were rushed, customers short changed, because it was harder to get discount, but mostly it was the moaning motor trade who complained the loudest, despite profiting the most.
In reality, if you were any good at the business of selling cars, August was just a welcome late summer blip that usefully pumped up your wallet. For the lumbering dealer groups, moribund manufacturers and clueless trade bodies (eg Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders) it was a disaster area. Something to be messed with. Improved. Ruined.
If you wondered when all the fun went out of buying new cars well it all started when we lost August and it was split between two of the duller months of the year, March and September.
Of course in the old days there was always January to fall back on. Incredibly there were two peaks to the year, registering a car in January 1998 rather than December 1997 was another way to make customers happy with a reg date that added value and not give them as bigger discount. So the clever people didn’t actually do anything clever at all they simply mucked it all up. Part of a deliberate government led policy to make buying a car less fun.
The thing is that registering cars has always been something of a con which you need to take with a pinch of salt. On the one hand it was dealers registering cars to hit targets to get a bonus or two. Increasingly it became the manufacturers telling dealers to do it or using the dealer system they own or control to shore up their market share. Delivery mileage motors were suddenly everywhere. There was no such thing as a cancelled fleet order, it was just the industry doing what it did best, selling you lies, without actually selling anything at all.
Analyse the low mileage electricity vehicles being advertised and they will have suspiciously odd histories having been parked on an airfield for years all buoyed up by an abuse of the system through colossal discounts. Meanwhile the level of registration deception and misreporting is rife. A collusion between the biased mainstream motoring media, the manufacturers and SMMT. Just look at July 2026 when EV registrations rose by 44.5%. The thing is that they were July 2026 with July 2025 when buyers were delaying purchases and waiting for clarification over which electric cars would qualify for the Government’s Electric Car Grant.
I could bore you with a history of number plates, but it is all rather pointless. Organising a bunch of old crocs was a British speciality. Local offices issuing dateless numbers to Edwardian Autocarists. It was all jolly good fun until possibly1st October 1974, when responsibility for the registration of vehicles was centralised and taken over by the Department of Transport. Everything was in place in Swansea. Initially it was the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Centre that we could all swear about. Then in In April 1990, the centre was renamed the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) becoming an executive agency of the Department for Transport.
You can’t blame the individuals who work there, but you can despise the whole damn system. It’s a monolith to making motoring needlessly complicated and most importantly, dreary. From the prefix to the suffix, which did so much make new cars buzz, running out of the alphabet ( surely they could have gone to a Middx for a bit) then bringing in the two reg system in 2001 was the beginning of the end. We are now at the end. Oh, but those green number plates in 2020 really helped didn’t they?
1976 was a world where Hattie Jacques could gaily cavort around a Datsun Cherry, safe in the knowledge that it would not break down and have a standard heated rear window, unlike the crap Austin Allegro your dad was stuck with. The 1970s may have been terrible, but not nearly as apocalyptic as the mid 2020s when the stark choice is characterless, Hattieless, battery powered, overpriced, transportation devices that comply with the ZEV mandate and styled by Quasimodo. Why would you ever get excited about the prospect of getting a vehicle with the latest registration?
For the anti car lobby, better known as the government, it is mission accomplished. 2026 is sort of ’76, but not in a good way.
