Ferrari Mailing List: Re: PROVA license plate: GOT IT !

[George (ygpz4re]

"but I can assure you, the staff that work in these organizations have absolutely no clue about any history of anything automotive-related. No clue whatsoever. None. Zip. Zadda."

Well....  Not always.  When Dad passed his old Jag off to me, I found a "year of manufacture" plate (i.e. a plate from 1954, with "54" stamped right in it) and had it restored to put on the car (VA does allow restored plates - not all states do).  When I went to the DMV to do the final registration, they couldn't figure out how to put the "x-xxx" format number into their computer.  One of the bright ladies there finally figured out that if they dropped the dash and put in a leading 0 (so, "0xxxx"), it all worked.  It shows up on the reg card that way (with the leading zero), but the DMV looks at the leading zero mathematically, that is, it adds nothing to the number.  And as a trivial aside, the year of manufacture number ("54") is also part of the reg number, so someone else could have the exact same number, but on a '55 or '56 or....plate and it's a "different" reg number.  Interesting, that.  ;-)

Maybe this isn't what was meant by the comment above, but it was refreshing to see the DMV folks working the problem to get a resolution satisfactory to me, rather then just themselves.

gp