When prefix car registration plates came to an end in 2001 with the Y prefix, DVLA had to introduce a new system to register new cars. The new style registration started with an area code to determine which part of the country the car was first registered to and ended with 3 random letters. The plate also includes two digits in the middle which represent the year the registration was issued. 02 would be 2002, 03 would be 2003 and so on. This is a great type of personalised registration if you should want two sets of initials on the same reg. You can search over 40 million New Style DVLA Registrations here