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Karl Schembri
With only 28 cars on the roads carrying personalised number plates – the prices of which started at Lm500 - the Malta Transport Authority (ADT) has come up with a new way to market its heftily priced products: it’s handing them out for free to its workers.
MaltaToday has learned that the authority has given at least 20 personalised number plates to its employees without charge in a bid to make them visible on the roads and hopefully entice other car owners to buy their own tailor-made plates.
A spokesman at the authority who confirmed the information said these were “only given on loan,” meaning that the ADT employees could not resell the plates and would have to hand them in at any moment the authority deemed fit.
“It’s a marketing exercise so that everyone will see more cars on the road carrying our new plates,” the spokesman said, adding that the plates remained the property of ADT.
A reader who contacted this newspaper said he was perplexed to see a junk of a car carrying a personalised number plate worth more than the vehicle, putting into doubt the effects of the ‘marketing’ exercise.
Since it was announced last November, ADT’s new personalised number plates scheme has had 28 online auction sales.
The ADT spokesman said one of the plates auctioned fetched a price as high as Lm800, but evidently not enough car owners see the point of spending so much to have their names stuck to their car bumpers.
Now prospective buyers might be even more put off when they realise that some car owners are carrying personal number plates for free, but the ADT spokesman says this should not be the case.
“There’s no harm in giving employees those number plates…they cannot transfer them to anyone else and we gave them specific conditions, unlike buyers who can resell their plates at any price they want at any time,” the spokesman said.
Personalised plates owners have to pay Lm200 in transfer fees to the transport authority when they resell their plates.
karl@newsworksltd.com
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