Looks like a LHD Seville Launch car on Autotrader

[Briodyjl01]

This makes quite interesting reading.

My car 001507 is S544 AOX and I also have a later V reg that was not a launch car but in the launch car chassis numbers. (Production 118789) this is V149 LOE. Both of these are Birmingham Longbridge registered cars.

I’ve helped a friend research early metros as he owns the only known 3 prototypes. And they are FOP 180V, EOL 773V and TUY 302V.

What we found out was when looking to the reg series the old style reg number like the metros with the date at the end were flipped for the date at the start so. EOL became LOE, FOP became POF ect ect. In doing the research different departments registered them differently. So one department might have had LOE one had AOX and one had OVP ect. But there’s differences aswell so I’ve seen a reg cars with AOE and other combinations. It starts to get a little sad when you can look at a reg number and tell if it was a factory replaced car to some degree or if it will have an interesting past.

One of my metros is a convertible and that was originally M360 NPG. You would find that NPG and WPD were rover finance Shirley Solihull reg numbers. These cars all came back from jersey.




QUOTE=NickDunning;2990203]A few years ago I had this conversation with Stephen Cox, who was head of Network Sales training at Longbridge. This was when I owned S392DEH, which was chassis number 001157 (the oldest surviving V6 engined car potentially).


"Your car carries the DEH alpha sequence on the plate and that indicates to me it's
one of those originally Spanish registered. Those that were licensed originally in
Birmingham carried AOX plates, like mine, S 433 AOX. The press garage had to
license these Spanish cars manually, so to speak, meaning they didn't have access to the
direct computer links manufacturers had to licence their own cars directly with DVLA.
My guess is that once they had established how to go about this by conversation with
DVLA, someone would have been given the job to batch register these "imported" cars
at a local vehicle licensing office near to someone's home! Such was the informal
nature of how Longbridge worked. I seem to remember that EH was local to Wolverhampton
In the old days of manual licensing prior to the major reorganisation of that system in
the 1970s, that bears some research of course".

It seems that cars that couldn't be registered online as previously registered abroad were hand registered possibly at Wolverhampton. Hence the S---DEH registrations.[/QUOTE]

[NickDunning]

Originally Posted by Briodyjl01

One of my metros is a convertible and that was originally M360 NPG. You would find that NPG and WPD were rover finance Shirley Solihull reg numbers. These cars all came back from jersey.

Guildford registered vehicles. Maybe Mann Egerton there had the re-import business. Must have been fairly lucrative!

Just looked it up and DEH (the last two letters are the key (EH) is a Stoke On Trent number plate.