OPINION: In defence of Q-plates

Officially, a Q-plate is issued to cars whose age cannot be verified. That’s it. That’s all it means. A normal age-related plate simply reflects the date of first registration rather than having any bearing on when the car was actually manufactured, so even conventional numberplates are fairly arbitrary.

There may be many reasons a car’s age – sorry, original first date of registration – is called into question. Sometimes, personally imported cars have lost their paperwork and have to be given a Q. Some Ministry of Defence vehicles are Q-plated because their origins are secret. Heavily modified cars should sometimes qualify for a Q depending on the severity of the changes, but often continue to run illegally with their original identities. When I was a child, all the local milkfloats were Q-plates. I’ve never known why – answers on a postcard for that one, please!

Kit cars have also traditionally been common recipients of Q registrations because they can be made from a mix of new components and donor parts of varying ages. In reality, most newly registered kit cars these days are registered either on new plates (if they’re made from all new parts barring one second-hand item, such as the gearbox that has been reconditioned) or an age-related plate. So, if you build your car from a new kit and one single donor, such as a P-reg Mazda MX-5, it will be given a previously-unissued P-plate.

But I digress. The point is that there are many different reasons a car can be given a Q-plate, and many of them have no bearing on the quality or provenance of the car you’re looking at. Tarring them all with the same brush is as nonsensical as saying you don’t like K-reg cars because some K-reg cars have been flood damaged. You might as well say you don’t like blue cars because some of them are undisclosed write-offs.

One loophole of Q-plates is that, for emissions purposes, they’re considered to have been first registered in 1975. That means you pass an MOT as long as there’s no visible smoke coming from the exhaust. Some people in the know have favoured Q-plates for this very reason as it means you can legally remap engines for performance rather than emissions. There’s a flipside to that now: clean Q-plates are still subject to ULEZ charges, even if they emit fewer nasties than exempt cars. Swings and roundabouts. Another downside is resale value, but that’s only a negative if you’re a vendor. For a knowledgeable buyer who can tell one Q-plate from another, it’s a money-saving tip.

Finally, some disclosure. I own a car with a Q-plate. It’s a Sylva Riot, which is the best Caterham alternative you’ve probably never heard of. But that’s not the point. The point is that I’m not defending Q-plates because I have one; it’s the other way round. I have one because I don’t have a problem with them. When I first registered the car post-build, I could easily have done a paperwork shuffle to have it registered on a W-plate to reflect the Ford Puma donor. It would still have been the same car, but wouldn’t have raised the eyebrows of the uninitiated. But I’m blind to the negative connotations so many people associate with Qs, so I didn’t bother.

Anyway, I quite like the enigma of my Q-reg car and the nod it receives from those who know. At the risk of revealing more about myself than I should, I’ll also admit that I enjoy marking down those who sneer at it without understanding its meaning.

Sylva Riot, Metro 6R4 replica and Henson M30 images courtesy of Complete Car Builder magazine, Ford Escort image courtesy of Iconic Auctioneers