Research Car Makes/Models/Number Plates
Discussion
For a new business I'm interested in the most popular makes and models of cars that have private number plates, particularly short combinations of numbers/letters.
Can anyone suggest the best way to do this? I thought perhaps scraping the DVLA gov.uk website, but think they probably have protection (note I'm not interested in any private data, no individual registration numbers, just which Porsche model has the highest number of short private registrations, for example). I know you can licence the data drom the DVLA but would that allow me to interogate all the data?
Any help would be gratefully received, thanks.
Can anyone suggest the best way to do this? I thought perhaps scraping the DVLA gov.uk website, but think they probably have protection (note I'm not interested in any private data, no individual registration numbers, just which Porsche model has the highest number of short private registrations, for example). I know you can licence the data drom the DVLA but would that allow me to interogate all the data?
Any help would be gratefully received, thanks.
I don't think the DVLA downloadable data includes that kind of detail - or certainly not the stuff that's easily accessible. The stuff I downloaded would be enough for someone to write a clone of the "how many left" web site, but it doesn't deal with individual registration marks.
As an entirely non-scientific approach, you could look through the last 100 pages of the "Real good numbers plates" thread in general gassing. Someone on there has a web site that lists 1-1 plates, or maybe it's expanded to 2-2 plates, I forget.
As an entirely non-scientific approach, you could look through the last 100 pages of the "Real good numbers plates" thread in general gassing. Someone on there has a web site that lists 1-1 plates, or maybe it's expanded to 2-2 plates, I forget.
droopsnoot said:
I don't think the DVLA downloadable data includes that kind of detail - or certainly not the stuff that's easily accessible. The stuff I downloaded would be enough for someone to write a clone of the "how many left" web site, but it doesn't deal with individual registration marks.
As an entirely non-scientific approach, you could look through the last 100 pages of the "Real good numbers plates" thread in general gassing. Someone on there has a web site that lists 1-1 plates, or maybe it's expanded to 2-2 plates, I forget.
Thanks for the suggestion. Just in case it is of use to anyone searching in the future, the DVLA will sell the bulk data set, which has everything I need but only on a yearly subscription. It costs £24K down, then 12 monthly payments of £6K, so £96K. You get a full data set, then weekly updates. They wouldn't consider giving me a "snapshot" of a reduced data set.As an entirely non-scientific approach, you could look through the last 100 pages of the "Real good numbers plates" thread in general gassing. Someone on there has a web site that lists 1-1 plates, or maybe it's expanded to 2-2 plates, I forget.
The Open Data User Group had previously recommended to the Government to make this data open and freely available in 2013, but nothing came of it.
Most of the data (vehicle make, date of registration, but not model) is available from the Vehicle Enquiry Service at https://vehicleenquiry.service.gov.uk, and the licence there quoted is the Open Government Licence v3.0, so I assume this means there is nothing to stop me scraping that site for all possible VRMs, but I imagine it is being monitored and they would shut it down. Might give it a go though...
RM said:
The Open Data User Group had previously recommended to the Government to make this data open and freely available in 2013, but nothing came of it.
I recall a similar conversation with someone about the Postcode Address File data, though I'm out of that market now and have no idea whether it ever happened. At least PAF data was available at different costs depending on what subset of data you needed, and what you were doing with it.droopsnoot said:
I recall a similar conversation with someone about the Postcode Address File data, though I'm out of that market now and have no idea whether it ever happened. At least PAF data was available at different costs depending on what subset of data you needed, and what you were doing with it.
It's similar, except the PAF starts at £600, not £96,000. I confirmed with the DVLA however that the public website offering the same is licensed under an open license, so it can be scraped.sybaseian said:
I would hate to be cold called just because of my number plates.
I hate to be cold called about anything!There's no data that identifies a person, it's just registration, make, model, date of registration. I don't want to use it for marketing, I'm just trying to identify which models of cars most often have short registration numbers.
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