Using AI to Find the Right Personalised Registration

There are thousands of registrations for sale. Finding the one that actually means something is another matter.

Personalised registrations are one of those things that can consume an extraordinary amount of time. There are thousands of them for sale, spread across the DVLA and numerous registration dealers, and most searches depend on you already knowing roughly what you are looking for.

AI changes that rather nicely.

I have been looking for a registration for my 1972 Triumph GT6 restomod. The obvious starting point was GT6, but there are complications. The car is a 1972 L-suffix vehicle, so I cannot simply put a later registration on it because it happens to contain GT6. A personalised registration cannot be used to make a vehicle appear newer than it is.

That immediately gives AI something useful to do. Instead of searching only for GT6, I told it what the car was, its age, what was being done to it and roughly what I was prepared to spend.

There was another complication. My GT6 isn’t going to remain mechanically standard. It is being fitted with a Mazda 1.8-litre turbo engine. So the search could include GT, GT6, Triumph, 6, 18, 180, 1800, turbo and various combinations of them.

Then somebody – me, eventually – remembered Northern Irish registrations.

This opens a much more interesting door for older cars. Northern Irish registrations are effectively dateless, which makes them particularly useful on classics. They generally contain an I or Z in the letter group and can be transferred to older vehicles without making the vehicle appear newer than it really is.

That is where the AI search became rather more productive.

It started looking through registrations containing combinations which might mean something rather than merely reproducing GT6. One series that emerged was TRZ.

And I rather liked it.

TRZ sounds as though it could be a Triumph model in its own right. Given that my car will cease to be anything Triumph ever actually built, I could call the finished restomod the Triumph TRZ. Suddenly the registration isn’t merely a registration. It has given the project a name.

The search then becomes more specific.

TRZ 6 would be lovely, but expensive.

TRZ 180 would give TRZ plus the 1.8-litre engine.

Better still would be:

TRZ 618

Read in the context of the car, that becomes TRZ for the identity of the restomod, 6 for GT6 and 18 for the 1.8-litre engine.

Whether that particular registration ever becomes available at a sensible price is another matter. AI cannot conjure a registration into existence, although at times it appears remarkably willing to try.

And that brings me to an important warning.

AI is very good at generating possibilities and searching large numbers of listings, but it can also be fooled by registration dealers’ websites. During my search it confidently reported that TRZ 180 was available for £314. When I followed the link, the actual registration being offered was TRZ 1800.

That was useful in itself. It demonstrated the difference between using AI to search and allowing AI to make the buying decision.

I changed the instruction. From then on, a registration was not to be reported as available unless the AI had opened the individual dealer listing and verified that the registration on the page was exactly the registration it was reporting.

That is probably the most important lesson if you try this yourself.

Don’t simply ask, “Find me a personalised registration for my Triumph.”

Give the AI the same information you would give a particularly persistent human researcher. Tell it the make, model and year of the vehicle. Tell it anything unusual about the car. Give it your initials if they matter. Tell it your budget. Most importantly, tell it to search creatively rather than simply looking for literal spellings.

Numbers can represent engine capacities, model numbers or years. Letters can suggest manufacturers, models, owners’ initials or nicknames. Northern Irish registrations add another large pool of dateless combinations which can be particularly useful for classics.

Then tell it to search the DVLA and reputable registration dealers, compare prices and reject anything which cannot legally be assigned to the vehicle.

Finally, make it verify the exact registration on the actual sales page before getting excited.

There is another useful trick. AI can keep looking.

I now have a weekly automated search running for TRZ 618, GTZ 618 and a handful of other combinations. Rather than repeatedly visiting registration sites to see whether anything interesting has appeared, the AI can do the trawling and only tell me when it finds something genuinely worth looking at.

That, to me, is where AI becomes useful rather than merely clever.

It hasn’t found my registration yet.

But it has apparently designed a new Triumph model.

The Triumph TRZ.

I think I’ll keep that.

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