FAB

Now let's have no nonsense. Cars are wonderful. Cars are important. A car can be your best friend, taking you here and there in safety and style, in all weathers. My own car, Fiona, has done this for me for almost ten years.

One day she will go into honourable retirement. Which means that she will be traded in as part of a scrappage scheme linked to the purchase of a new car. I'd want her to be fully recycled, to have a new incarnation in somebody else's appreciative hands, somewhere else in the world. Reborn.

I expect that to happen in five or six years' time, in a changed motoring world where a lot has been done to install fast-charging electric points all over the country, many of them in homes, and places like caravan club sites. Another, better, generation of all-electric cars will have been developed, produced (and priced) for the mass-market. A person like me will be able to buy a stylish, well-equipped, practical car - one very suitable for caravanning - for under £30,000 in today's money.

I don't think that's a dream. But the development of next-generation electric cars and the necessary infrastructure - and my buying into it - will necessarily have to be five or six years away, to give me time to build my savings up.

I intend to buy, so that I can have unfettered use of my next car. The current vogue for leasing in various guises won't suit me. There are too many usage restrictions, and end-of-term penalties on such things as a high annual mileage, and I don't think I'd be allowed to tow anything.

I don't necessarily need to save all the purchase price. I might decide to keep some capital back, and instead finance anything up to £10,000 with a bank loan. What I save on running and maintenance costs should cover the loan repayments. And I'm factoring in the cost of a portable induction fast-charger, for use at home or away.

Although my next car is years off, I've been thinking about certain preparations for ownership. Such as clearing my garage out, and uprating the electrics within. And one or two other things.

Such as what colour will my car be. Traditionally, I always buy blue cars. Might that change? (Probably not)

Such as what I shall call my car. Fiona has started a trend: all subsequent cars must be female, and must have a female name. Perhaps a name beginning with F, in succession to Fiona? Freya, for instance? Well, there's plenty of time to consider that.

One very important aspect of my next car's identity will be the registration plate. And I can't leave it to chance that something suitable will be available at the time. There's a certain urgency about buying something I fancy in advance. Car plate dealers have proliferated online, and they like to snap up anything that might have a sale value. The DVLA themselves withdraw interesting plates from the general release, if they think they might instead raise a decent amount in one of their own regular auctions. So what gets issued when you buy a new car is usually dull and nondescript. Of course, some people want a plate like that, or just don't care what they get.

Well, let's say I wish farewell to Fiona, and hello to my next car, in late 2025. An ordinary, contemporary plate for that date will be on the lines of GX75 ABC, where G means 'Sussex or Kent', X narrows it down to 'Sussex', 75 means 'registered sometime between 1st September 2025 and 28th February 2026', and ABC is simply a random three-letter combination churned out by some computer. The odds are against the plate being in any way distinctive, or having any personal significance. I don't think this will be good enough for my next car. She'll deserve a proper personalised number plate.

I had a personalised plate ready for Fiona. I bought it from the DVLA while she was being manufactured. She was 'born' as SC10 CUR. I have explained in other posts that 'scio cur' is bad Latin for 'I know why' - the only half-sensible phrase I could make with a 10-registration. Unless I resorted to cheating. But I scorn plates which mess around with the spacing (it's illegal anyway), or treat 2 as Z, 1 and 3 as B, 4 as A, 5 as S, 6 as G, 7 as T, 8 as B, and 9 as G. You see these plates around, plenty of them. They are not cool. But SC10 CUR used legal spacing, standard spelling, and had a certain scholarly subtlety. Unfortunately only one person has ever worked out that it means something in Latin. The world is just too plebian.

Poor Fiona! I wish I could have bought F1 ONA for her, but it wasn't available - nor would it ever be affordable. I think from memory that plate was first sold way back in 1969 for a (then) stupendous £15,000. Surely one would pay £100,000 now! Gosh, at least that. Maybe much, much more.

Back to my point: if I left the selection of a plate until 2025, I'd be scraping the barrel. Better to buy something decent now - but definitely not pay much for it!

You are allowed to buy and display any historic plate you can find (and afford), so long as it doesn't make the car seem younger than its true age. But anything from the older pre-2001 numbering schemes would probably be too expensive. Even something from the current numbering scheme would prove costly if it used all seven letters and numbers to spell out a name or saying. There aren't many letter/number combinations that do, and buying one of them would be way too expensive.

I could of course simply transfer Fiona's plate SC10 CUR to the next car, at no extra cost whatever. But passing the baton on like that didn't appeal. It would have been Fiona's plate. The new car should have her own plate.

Still, there was nothing wrong in making it another SC10 plate. That would allow a pleasing continuity. Also, I was keen in any case to have another Scottish plate. (All registrations that begin with an S are Scottish. SC denotes a car local to Glasgow) English plates in Scotland stand out a mile. It had always been very satisfying, on my visits to Scotland, to park Fiona among other Scottish cars and pretend that I was just a local.

Another thing: settling on plain old SC10 put all the emphasis on the last three letters. What I needed, therefore, was a three-letter combination after SC10 that would catch the eye, and convey something positive about my car.

What would my next car look like? Well, here's a screen print of the latest all-electric Lotus, culled from a BBC webpage:

It costs over £2 million pounds, but its capabilities - and its ability to charge up in only nine minutes - will trickle down to humbler cars. I'm thinking though that its looks might trickle down rather faster, and that in five or six years time, all-electric cars should look very exciting. So, I needed a letter combination that would suit such a car. Like FAB.

And you know what? When I looked on the DVLA website, in the pages for personalised number plates you could buy, I found that SC10 FAB was available. It would look good on Fiona:

But on a car with futuristic styling? Mmmm! FABulous!

Other letter-combinations were also available. I considered one that hinted at electrical motors whizzing at speed: SC10 BUZ. One that would go with a blue car: SC10 BLU. Or one that was in the luxury class: SC10 LUX. Then there were plates that indicated a lady driver: SC10 BRA, SC10 HER. And others like SC10 AAA, SC10 BBB, SC10 GGG, or SC10 AXE, SC10 BAT, SC10 BOO, SC10 EYE or SC10 KAT that for one reason or another caught the eye. But SC10 FAB was for me the standout choice.

I bought it forthwith. I now have the Form V750 that proves that it's mine to transfer to any car within the next ten years. The first bit of my next car, in the bag.

The cost? A modest £250, all in. That's less than the cost of a 32-inch Sony HD TV in a Black Friday deal at John Lewis.

FAB...? Oh yes - there was an association! Do you remember the TV puppet series Thunderbirds back in the 1960s? It was all about International Rescue. A philanthropist father (Jeff Tracy) and several sons (Scott, Virgil, Alan, Gordon and John), living on a secret island, each son in charge of a specialised rescue craft. Thunderbird One, Two, Three, Four and Five. Aided by scientific staff such as Brains. Plus a glamorous female agent called Lady Penelope and her chauffeur Parker, who operated from London, England, and went around in a pink six-wheeled Rolls-Royce of advanced styling. Its registration plate was FAB 1.

She was certainly glamorous in every way; so sophisticated, so elegant:

Parker, on the other hand was a bit of rough, with shifty eyes. He always needed a shave. He mostly said 'Yus, m'lady' and not much else.

Dare I tell a joke? Skip it if you know it. You probably do.

[Lady Penelope finds Parker in her bedroom. She's ready for bed]

Penelope: Parker, take off my dress.

Parker: Yus, m'lady. 

Penelope: Parker, take off my bra.

Parker: Yus, m'lady.

Penelope: Now, Parker, take off my panties.

Parker: Yus, m'lady.

Penelope: That will be all, Parker. Now leave my bedroom.

Parker: Yus, m'lady.

[As he reaches the door] 

Penelope: Oh by the way, Parker, never let me catch you wearing my clothes again.

Parker: No, m'lady.

Well, it was funny once.

There's yet another Thunderbirds association. Every time Jeff Tracy sent his sons off to do some international rescuing, they used a call acknowledgement FAB. 

So it might be:

Virgil: Scott, I'm flying bearing 260 and will arrive in eleven minutes!

Scott: FAB, Virgil.

Or:

Gordon: Virgil, I think the engines are about to explode! And we've somehow lost the rescue pod!

Virgil: FAB, Gordon.

Or:

Alan: My strings are in a right tangle! And I'm plunging into the abyss!

Jeff Tracy: Well, do what you can, Alan.

Alan: FAB, father!

You get the idea. FAB means 'Heard and understood'. Or arguably, 'Fabulous'. Apparently the creators of Thunderbirds did confirm that it was just a string of meaningless letters on the lines of OK, and that the letters FAB didn't actually stand for anything - such as '**** And Bugger'. 

Nevertheless, these are two notable FAB connections that may strike a chord with some of the people I will zoom past in 2025. Silently zooming, mind you, because that's how all-electric cars are.