How much would you spend to customise your car?
In the world of the rich and famous, personalised number plates sometimes cost more than a brand-new car itself. Even more, according to the DVLA, in the last 25 years, the organisation raised over £2 billion from auctioning special plates, and they don’t plan to stop anytime soon.
The hype surrounding personalised plates is far from over, as more and more people like to invest their time and money in finding cool-sounding plates that will turn heads and make the news. As it turns out, the process is rather simple: all you need to do is visit a website for private plate registrations and look for your favorite combination.
Most Expensive Personalised Plates in the UK
As you can imagine, the plates that are likely to produce more than the standard amount are auctioned by the DVLA, and they don’t go cheap. Let’s have a look at some of the registrations that have been sold for obscene amounts of money along the road.
VIP 1
Price: £285,000
Owner: Roman Abramovich
Year of transaction: 2006
The wealthy Russian businessman and owner of the Chelsea football team decided to show the world he is a Very Important Person by placing this highly exclusive personalised number plate on one of his many luxurious cars.
But the story of the plate doesn’t start with Abramovich as it was initially designed and used by Pope John Paul II. The plate was installed on the Popemobile when he first visited Ireland.
M 1
Price: £330,000
Owner: Mike McCoomb
Year of transaction: 2006
In the same year with ‘VIP 1’, DVLA made even a bigger sale, with the ‘M 1’ plate! The number was purchased by the former owner of Mobile Phone Store (a business that was sold to BT Cellnet in 2000) for his son’s six birthday.
F1
Price: £440,000
Owner: Afzal Khan
Year of transaction: 2008
Afzal Khan is a well-known entrepreneur who enjoys the perks of having a very expensive plate (which he now considers to be worth significantly more as he seeks to sell it on). For now, the plate rests nicely on his Mercedes SLR McLaren (the reason why he chose ‘F 1’).
For the year of the transaction, this was considered the most expensive personalised plate ever sold in the UK.
5
Price: £3.5million
Owner: Talal Ali Mohammed Khoury, Abu Dhabi
Year of transaction: 2007
As it turns out, the most expensive personalised plates in the world didn’t remain in the UK. These went to Abu Dhabi, to very wealthy Arab businessmen. The first most expensive plate was purchased in 2007 and was the number ‘5’. The owner also bought the number ‘55’ for a whopping £800,000 (compared to other purchases on our list).
When asked about these purchases, the owner didn’t seem at all impressed by the numbers. He just liked the idea of owning a car defined by only one number.
1
Price: £7million
Owner: Saeed Abdul Ghaffar Khouri, Abu Dhabi
Year of transaction: 2008
ell, it sits just right that the most expensive plate in the world would be the number ‘1’, right? As we already mentioned, this also goes to Abu Dhabi, and the owner decided on the purchase because it signifies being the best.
As you can see, nothing is too expensive when you have the right amount of money. The vast amount of cash being spent on personalised number plates alone is staggering. Just imagine how much some of these individuals will have spent on the actual cars themselves!
