LTA has an interesting PDF showing the list of license plate prefix and registration date of the prefix for Singapore cars. If you want to know how new/old a car is, it is a good reference#.
Based on this PDF, it can be observed that some prefixes which are proper English words are reserved or skipped, eg.
- SKY
- SLY
Some reserved prefixes are acronyms of well-known companies:
- SBS (Singapore Bus Services)
- SDC (Sentosa Development Corp)
However, other skipped or reserved prefixes don’t seem to have a pattern:
- SCB
- SCC
- SMB
I guess they may be acronyms of some entities that are not well known.
Some letters are also omitted, eg. O and I, presumably to avoid confusion with 0 and 1.
Based on the PDF, I asked Claude to do an analysis, to see the rate of car registrations based on prefixes. This is what it generated.
Interestingly, I gave ChatGPT (the non-plus version) the same prompt and it erred out on its first attempt, and simply generated Pandas code for me the second time round. The code doesn’t work as it attempted to extract data from the PDF using regex.
Based on the graph, it seems that some years have extremely high registrations, eg. 2003-2007. That corresponds to a period where prices are relatively low (prices from 2002 till current from sgcharts.com).
#There are exceptions of course, when people register a new license plate for an old car.