Five Things: car and personalised plate combos that must die!

Monday, 21 December 2020

Personalised number plates are a great way to express your individuality and creativity. Unless you go for these painfully obvious car/plate combos... (Video first published December 21, 2020)

Personalised plates are a great way to express your individuality and originality. Except when you do something that everyone else with a car like yours does.

Here are five car and personalised plate combinations that need to die.

Aston Martins and James Bond

Nope. James Bond never drove this one...

If you see an Aston Martin with a personalised plate it will almost certainly reference James Bond in some way or another. Every. Single. Damn. Time.

* Five Things: Hydrogen cars edition

Huh, so it’s a GTS? Lucky you put the plate on it or no-one would ever know. Unless they looked a little bit lower, that is.

* Five Things: Ranking the Supras

* Five famous Ferraris

Because it could have been one of those rare six-cylinder Z/28s...

Making matters worse it is also very likely to be a model of Aston that Bond never actually drove in any movie. While Bond is associated with every Aston Martin, he has only ever driven the iconic DB5, a couple of generations of DBS, a V8 Vantage, a V12 Vanquish and the fictional DB10 (although you could stretch that to cover the new Vantage) on screen.

So, no, your used DB7 definitely doesn’t deserve to wear a 007 personalised plate…

Aussie classics and model names

For some reason classic Aussie cars of any age all seem to get cursed with the same personalised plate choice – the thoroughly pointless reinforcement of the model name.

Smugness isn’t as bad as CO2, but it's close.

Yep, we know that your Falcon is an XR8 – we can read the badges located just up from the number plate on the back, you really didn’t need to drop a lazy grand to repeat that a little bit lower down.

The only possible exception to this would be if you did it ironically – having a crappy old Holden Camira with a FART number plate would be awesome ('Camira' comes from the Aboriginal word meaning 'wind”).

American muscle cars and V8s

American muscle cars are cool. There is no argument on that subject. At least none that will be tolerated here.

What is not cool is an American muscle car with a personalised plate that has “V8” appearing anywhere in it. Because the shatteringly obvious is never cool – your muscle car has a V8? No-one would ever have guessed that…

At least be original – announce that you have slapped a supercharger on it or boast about its power output, but just leave the V8 out of it.

The poor muscle car gets a double whammy, because it also suffers from the Aussie classic affliction of the dreaded repeating the model name…

Any EV and something smug

Hey, guess what – we know your Tesla runs on electricity! You don’t need to tell us that.

The number plate version of virtue signalling is slapping a LOLOIL or NOCO2 plate on your expensive car to rub it into the plebs that you are better at saving the planet than them.

Nissan Leafs or other less expensive EV aren’t exactly immune from this either and the waves of smugness coming off their number plates are possibly worse than actual CO2 emissions from ICE vehicles.

You have wonder if the owners also yell loudly when they are putting their recycling bin up at the curb for collection just so the neighbours know…

Jaguars and cats

Okay, we get that a Jaguar is a big cat and that big, wild, vicious animals are a great image for your thrusting sports car or sporting sedan to project, but just leave the CAT out of the Jag plate…

Any one of the endless combinations of BADCAT, QIKCAT or EVLCAT are just so overdone as to be embarrassing now.

To make it worse, they are rarely on anything even remotely bad, quick or evil. It's usually just a janky old XK8 with saggy suspension, one wonky headlight and an asthmatic old AJ V8 that is down a cylinder and probably barely wheezes out 180 of its original 216kW…