How Much Would You Pay for a License Plate?

We have standard license plates on our cars with no extra costs.

However, in China, people (or maybe only wealthy people) are crazy about license plates with so called lucky numbers such as 6, 8, or 9 (US Mint even sells Lucky Money around Chinese New Year every year with dollar bills containing these lucky numbers), especially 6 and 8 together. For example, according to this article, a license plate with number AC 6688 was auctioned for RMB 80,000 last year (or a little more than $10K) and a 9999 plate auctioned in Hong Kong two years ago had a price tag of HK$990,000.

However, none of these came even close to a plate auctioned yesterday at a charitable event in UAE.

Gulfnews says a special plate with only a number 5 (what’s the speical meaning of 5?) on it fetched more than $6M in an event which will benefit “people with special needs and accident victims.” The previous record of most expensive license plate was a M1 plate sold in England last year for £331,500.

Of course, these plates were all autioned for special events.

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