UK number plate guides
What a UK registration tells you, and how to search for a vehicle when you only have part of one. Every guide ends in a search you can run against the DVSA MOT record.
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How to search a partial number plate
How many characters you actually need, what
*and?do, and which two characters of a UK plate are worth more than the rest put together. -
Tracing a car from a partial plate after a hit and run
What a partial registration can and cannot get you — including why no public record will name the keeper — and how to give the police something they can act on.
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UK number plate area codes
The full DVLA memory tag table: which letter belongs to which issuing region, and why it says where a car was sold rather than where it lives.
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UK number plate year identifiers
Every age identifier from
51onwards with the months it covers, plus the prefix and suffix letters that came before them.Includes a page for each: what year a 65 plate, 57 plate or 76 plate is, and every other identifier the scheme has issued.
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Number plate characters that get misread
The characters that blur into each other on dashcam and CCTV footage — 8 and B, 0 and O, 5 and S — and how to search for all the readings at once.
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Searching for a car by make, model and colour
What you can find with no registration at all: marque, model, paint, fuel, issuing region, age and MOT status, in any combination.
The handbook
The guides above each take one question. The number plate handbook is the shorter overview they all sit under: what the DVSA MOT record holds, what it does not, who uses this and the questions people arrive with — the first of which is whether any of this finds the owner of a car. It does not, and neither does anything else that is public.
Two characters of a plate is enough to begin.