Man invests $30,000 just to have unique license plate number

A man from Hyderabad, India, made headlines after spending $30,000 on a custom license plate.

The number plate in question features the same digit repeated four times, and is apparently quite rare.

It is also clearly sought after, considering this man was ready to spend $30,000 on it.

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The car owner in question is an entrepreneur from Hyderabad, the capital of Telangana in southern-central India.

And the irony is that, while the number is expensive, the car associated with the number plate isn’t.

It’s a Toyota Land Cruiser LX, which isn’t the cheapest car in the world by any means, but it’s no Rolls-Royce.

When number plates cost more than the car

When it comes to custom number plates, two countries spring to mind.

The US, because getting a custom number plate is common practice in the States, and Dubai, because that’s where world records are set.

The record for the world’s most expensive number plate has been set and broken and set again many times in Dubai.

A while back, somebody paid $2 million for a personalized license plate.

On another occasion, somebody paid a whopping $9.5 million for a number plate.

A custom license plate isn’t always available

You could essentially split countries into two macro-categories when it comes to number plates.

There are countries with no fixed format and countries where there is one.

In Italy and France, for example, the format is letter-letter-digit-digit-digit-letter-letter.

You can, in theory, customize those too, but you can never change the format.

And then there are several countries where the first two characters of the license plate are an indication of where the car is registered.

By contrast, there are places, like the US, where you can have just about anything you want as a license plate, and that’s where the ‘market’ for custom plates is more developed.

Check out ASAP Rocky’s ‘Need for Speed’ Mercedes-Benz 190E, which features a customized license plate.