Car registrations - Auction madness in China

Again, a few days without a blog post. However did you cope? To be completely honest, there's not a whole lot of number plate-related news around at the moment, with the exception of a story which landed on my desk this morning from China. It seems they're really good at making paper aeroplanes over there. As you will have noticed from the Numberplates.com website, there has been some tremendous sales of car registrations at auctions in other countries around the world, and these auctions certainly seem to be the place to buy car registrations at ridiculously over-inflated prices.

This story in particular focuses on an auction in Shanghai this weekend. That's the Shanghai in China, by the way; not the one just outside Macclesfield. They seem to have a rather different system for issuing and auctioning off car registrations in China, and I'm not sure I entirely understand it just yet. However, the record price for a plate was broken with a £3,330 bid, or the equivalent in Chinese Yuan. Now, that doesn't seem a whole lot of money for a 'record' number plate, so I'm not completely sure this particular registration was all that good. In fact, my news sources don't even state which plate it was. How am I supposed to work with this kind of information? Absolutely ridiculous. In contrast, the 'bottom level' of car registrations sold for £3,235. Now, I'm no maths genius but that seems to show a deviation of £95 between the cheapest number plates and the Chinese Super Mega Hyper World Record plate. Most odd.*

In other news, the next issue of the Regtransfers magazine is coming along nicely. It features Sir Stirling Moss on the front cover as a prelude to a fascinating interview with the man himself. We can also reveal that the issue after that will feature multi-millionaire businessman and star of BBC's Dragons' Den, Duncan Bannatyne. The Stirling Moss issue is due for release in the first week of October, with Duncan Bannatyne appearing in our New Year edition in the first week of January. Don't forget that you can request a copy of our magazine (the latest copy contains an interview with Amir Khan) at any time through Numberplates.com.

* I had actually tried to work in a sneaky reference to Chinese Communism and distribution of wealth, but I then realised that I actually know nothing about the subject and couldn't finish the sentence. So there.