{"id":2110,"date":"2025-01-13T13:09:15","date_gmt":"2025-01-13T05:09:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tongwing.woon.sg\/blog\/?p=2110"},"modified":"2025-01-13T13:13:51","modified_gmt":"2025-01-13T05:13:51","slug":"singapore-car-prefix-registration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tongwing.woon.sg\/blog\/singapore-car-prefix-registration\/","title":{"rendered":"Singapore Car Prefix Registration"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lta.gov.sg\">LTA<\/a> has an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lta.gov.sg\/content\/dam\/ltagov\/who_we_are\/statistics_and_publications\/statistics\/pdf\/M031-Car_Prefix.pdf\">interesting PDF<\/a> 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#.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Based on this PDF, it can be observed that some prefixes which are proper English words are reserved or skipped, eg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>SKY<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>SLY<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Some reserved prefixes are acronyms of well-known companies:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>SBS (Singapore Bus Services)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>SDC (Sentosa Development Corp)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>However, other skipped or reserved prefixes don&#8217;t seem to have a pattern:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>SCB<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>SCC<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>SMB<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>I guess they may be acronyms of some entities that are not well known.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Some letters are also omitted, eg. O and I, presumably to avoid confusion with 0 and 1.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><a href=\"https:\/\/tongwing.woon.sg\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/car_registration_rate.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"880\" height=\"465\" src=\"https:\/\/tongwing.woon.sg\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/car_registration_rate.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2111\" srcset=\"https:\/\/tongwing.woon.sg\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/car_registration_rate.png 880w, https:\/\/tongwing.woon.sg\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/car_registration_rate-300x159.png 300w, https:\/\/tongwing.woon.sg\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/car_registration_rate-768x406.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 880px) 100vw, 880px\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>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&#8217;t work as it attempted to extract data from the PDF using regex.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 <a href=\"https:\/\/coe.sgcharts.com\/\">sgcharts.com<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https:\/\/tongwing.woon.sg\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/coe-prices.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"529\" src=\"https:\/\/tongwing.woon.sg\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/coe-prices-1024x529.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2112\" srcset=\"https:\/\/tongwing.woon.sg\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/coe-prices-1024x529.png 1024w, https:\/\/tongwing.woon.sg\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/coe-prices-300x155.png 300w, https:\/\/tongwing.woon.sg\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/coe-prices-768x397.png 768w, https:\/\/tongwing.woon.sg\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/coe-prices.png 1116w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size\"><em>#There are exceptions of course, when people register a new license plate for an old car.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tongwing.woon.sg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2110"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tongwing.woon.sg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tongwing.woon.sg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tongwing.woon.sg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tongwing.woon.sg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2110"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tongwing.woon.sg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2115,"href":"https:\/\/tongwing.woon.sg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2110\/revisions\/2115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tongwing.woon.sg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tongwing.woon.sg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tongwing.woon.sg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}