MOTOR VEHICLES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 May 1941, Page 4

MOTOR VEHICLES

ISSUE OF NEW NUMBER PLATES RELICENSING BEGINS. PETROL COUPONS FOR COMING YEAR. Relicensing of motor vehicles for the year beginning on June 1 has started at post offices. The procedure will be similar to the procedure in previous years, except that vehicles will be licensed for 13 months, instead of 12 months, so as to make June in future the month for annual relicensing. The fees for licences and the insurance premiums will be proportionately higher on this occasion. The plates which will be fixed to vehicles at the end of this month will have white figures on a black ground. Post office officials are urging owners of vehicles to get their new plates as early as possible, for they say that toward the end of the month applicants will almost certainly have to wait in queues. The war has left the post office with a staff which is not expected to keep pace with the work as well as did pre-war staffs, or even the staff last year. Not only are there fewer workers, but those that the department has are not as well trained or as familiar with the work as the regular officers. Inexperienced women ■ are at the desks where experienced ■ men used to sit. The business is most conveniently conducted at the post office which has the records relating to the vehicle. Apart from the vehicles that have been impressed for the Army, it is not expected that there will be any substantial reduction in the number of vehicles relicensed. The effect of impressment will be most marked among motor-cycles. When a car is relicensed its owner is given a new sheet of petrol coupons like the sheets of coupons that were given out last year and similarly numbered from 1 to 36. The coupons that will remain unused at the end of this month will become obsolete, and the authorities will ask possessors of them to destroy them. Coupons on the new sheet will begin to be used next month. To prevent the old coupons being passed off as new ones the new coupons have been made distinctive with a stamp on the back.

MASTERTON REGISTRATIONS. EARLY APPLICATION URGED. The Postmaster, Mr Ml M. Simpson, pointed out this morning that last year there was considerable congestion at the Masterton Post Office towards the end of the month in connection with the registration of motor vehicles. Owing to staffing difficulties arising out of war conditions it was not likely that the work of the staff would be easier this year and the public was urged not to leave its business to the last week in the month, as if it did so delay would be unavoidable. The first instalment of the number plates to be issued in the district will be from number 2,700 onwards.