There are a lot of things a person could do with $20 million. They could afford approximately seven Bugatti Chirons, buy nearly three of Michael Schumacher’s Formula One cars at a record high price, or run an underfunded race team at the top level of NASCAR for more than a year. Or they could purchase a license plate.
They could purchase a single license plate with that amount of money, to be clear—not every license plate in the world, all dusted in 24-karat yellow gold and diamonds before delivery as a result of some strange plate fetish. Just one.
The UK plate listed for more than $20 million says “F1” on it, and it appears to be for sale on a website called RegTransfers.com. The website advertised the F1 plate in 2014 for £10 million, according to reports like this one from Express, but representatives for the owner said he hadn’t given the website permission to advertise the plate as for sale. CarScoops seems to have found this recent listing.
Whether authorized or not this time around, the registration price for the plate is just over £12 million. There’s a standard Value Added Tax rate of 20 percent plus a couple of fees to bring the total list price to more than £14.4 million, or about $20.3 million at current exchange rates—all for a license plate for a car that would likely see more of the garage wall than anything else.
The same person has owned this plate for years: a businessperson named Afzal Kahn, who founded automotive company Kahn Design and bought the license plate in 2008 for nearly $900,000, according to Autoblog. He turned down £6 million offer to buy it in 2013, according to the Daily Mail, which Motor Authority reported to be equal to about $9.4 million in the U.S. at the time.
But it went up for sale the next year on RegTransfers.com for £10 million, which outlets like Express reported about in June of 2014. Representatives for Kahn said at the time that the plate wasn’t for sale, and that Kahn didn’t give the website permission to advertise it as such.
In similar fashion to turning down an offer of almost $10 million for the plate, Kahn’s representatives told Express at the time that he would consider selling it “if a suitable sum were offered.” The website autoevolution.com followed up on the story, writing that Kahn spoke to RegTransfers.com and that the sale page was taken down later that June.
As of those reports a few years ago, Kahn seemed like he wasn’t actively trying to sell is unique plate—he’d just entertain offers if they were high enough for his liking. While we at Jalopnik saw the listing on Thursday and can’t say how long it’s been for sale on RegTransfers.com, it seems odd to see it listed at all.
Jalopnik has reached out to Kahn’s company, Kahn Design, asking whether he approved the newest listing of his plate. We’ll update the story if we hear back.
If he did, there’s probably someone out there willing to pay almost $20 million for the thing. They probably have seven Chirons in the garage, too, just for the heck of it.