what year is it? and is there any way for an outsider to make sense of the british regristration system, Its got me totally baffeled
There may be a bit of variation on this but basically it's as follows.
On newer vehicles (since around the Summer of 2001) it's been as follows. You usually get two letters at the start followed by two numbers. When the numbers are "01" or "51" they denote early 2001 or second half of 2001 respectively. "02 and "52" are the same but for 2002 etc. I think we are currently on "07" reg (though it may now be 57 as I'm not sure which month the number changes from "0" to "5"). Hope that makes sense.
Prior to 2001 the year was denoted by the registration letter before the numbers. For instance, I had a "W" reg vehicle a while back. The reg was W297 EOC. The first "W" denoted the year. In this case it was year 2000. The registration letter used to change in August therefore a "W" reg could be 1999 or 2000. An "X" could be 2000 or 2001. A "V" could be 1998 or 1999 etc. There was a slightly different way of doing it before the "A" registrations which started around 1983 but we won't concern ourselves with that. Also, in slightly older vehicles where the single reg letter is at the start, we did omit some of them as they looked like numbers - things such as "0" for "O" and "1" for "I" and I think "Z" for "7". The "Q" reg is something on it's own and denotes a re-registered vehicle. It could be any year.
My current vehicle reg starts GK03. It was first registered in the first half of 2003.
It looks complicated but isn't really. It probably seems simpler to us because we are used to it here.
The system changed around 2000/2001 for two reasons. Firstly we were running out of letters of the alphabet. Also, changing the registration letter once a year meant that most new car sales were happening once a year when the reg changed. By changing to a system where it changed twice a year, it did ease the rush a bit.