A change of plates

REARVIEW:WOULD YOU pay €250 to have your county of choice on your numberplate?

Under a proposal from the Society of the Irish Motor Industry (Simi) buyers of used cars will be able to have their county registration changed. Simi reckons this could generate up to €20 million if just 10 per cent of the 750,000 annual used car buyers opted to change.

An overly ambitious target? Perhaps not. Frivolous though it may seem in this modern globalised world, a car’s registration really does have an impact on its resale value. For a start, snobbery and the parochialism of intercounty rivalries comes into play.

And then there’s the commonly-held belief that a car that has spent the majority of its life bouncing over bockety boreens it will have taken far more of a battering than one that’s been ambling through a city’s leafy suburbs. Purchasers will naturally gravitate towards a car that they feel has been cossetted in an urban garage rather than one that has been exposed to the worst Ireland’s weather and atrocious rural road network can throw at it.

Under this scheme, both buyers and sellers could alter their cars to make them more attractive.

Obviously, such a scheme would be rife for abuse by unscrupulous sellers. Therefore, if it is introduced, it must be accompanied by full traceability to ensure buyers don’t get suckered into buying something under false pretences.

That shiny motor advertised as having previously been owned by a spinster from Rathgar would suddenly become far, far less attractive if its true provenance of a life spent being raced over Cavan’s notoriously potholed backroads by a budding rally driver were disclosed.