Buy your new car with

Confidence and Security

With help from UKS your complete purchase transaction is directly with an official Mercedes-Benz Main Retailer.

UKS secures the best discount pricing and availability but is not a vehicle dealer. We locate the car or establish a new order lead time and confirm the discount negotiated using our volume strength.

Only when you are ready to proceed to a purchase do we introduce you to the Official M-B Retailer happy to provide those terms. Your entire purchase is directly from that official dealership, so the quality of attention and support is assured and your legal rights remain intact.

We strongly advise buying only from a Manufacturer’s Appointed Retailer.

UKS brings together private and business purchasers of brand new Mercedes cars to obtain special discounts afforded to volume sales. Individual buyers couldn’t hope to achieve similar savings while UKS successfully taps heavily into showroom profit margins, volume sales bonuses and promotion campaigns.

The combined result can often be a final price you’ll find hard to believe. It is quite usual for showroom sales personnel to refer to our discount agreements as “impossible”.

UKS is entirely independent of manufacturers and dealerships, which avoids any need to comply with manufacturer policies and localised discount limitations set by sales managers. We simply negotiate the very best deal possible from the dealership prepared to co-operate in favour of added volume sales, while maintaining the service quality required of an officially appointed retailer.

You buy the same Brand New car and you buy it through an official manufacturer appointed retail dealership, so your warranty and after-sales support are every bit the same as if you had paid a much higher price in a showroom.

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The DVLA initiative to generate revenue from the sale of rights to assign cherishable registration numbers must surely help to fund the huge driver and vehicle licensing operation, perhaps to the extent that our road tax and licence fees might otherwise be significantly higher. Is that just simplistic idealism on the part of you scribe? Perhaps the revenue simply gets stirred into the mass inefficiencies of central government expenditure, our road tax certainly does. In any event the rates for licence fees and road tax are undoubtedly set to a level the market will tolerate rather than any need to fill potholes.

Just like real commerce, the former Sale of Marks function must enjoy good times and suffer poor ones. If it really has passed, the recent recession will have produced depressed sales figures for DVLA so it's comforting to be able to forecast a couple of buoyant years, at least with new issue registration marks. Where the two date identifier numeric digits in a mark can represent alpha letters it becomes much easier to creatively represent a word or two. The '10' from March 2010 easily provides for words such as 'CLIO' and 'TRIO', while the 60 applicable from September could simply be used to read 'HUGO'. The alpha-representative numbers will continue through 2011 with 'II' and 'GI'.

The opportunities broaden enormously if one is prepared to perform little adjustments to digits or to their spacing. A '6' which reads like a 'G' is fine where it tricks the eye naturally, but to modify the number would be illegal. Similarly, adjustments to the spacing of digits to promote the appearance as a word or words is illegal.

With the ever increasing use of Object Character Recognition software in 'Number Plate Recognition' devices to identify vehicle registration marks, DVLA, DfT and the Police are becoming more vigilant in discouraging the display of marks in anything other than the prescribed form. The OCR software isn't wonderfully accurate yet but it is improving with ongoing development and it doesn't need to be confused by incorrectly displayed plates. Where the technology is deployed for the purpose of catching villains or for stopping uninsured drivers we should welcome it, even in the present strained relationship between constabularies and drivers who see them as speeding fine revenue generators.

So it seems a little unfair to see DVLA promoting the sale of plates which don't appear to hold any cherishable value until and unless they are constructed contrary to the regulations. DVLA tick the necessary compliance box quite adequately with the issue of a warning, but nevertheless continue to offer such marks for sale.

If you haven't guessed yet, I should reveal that the increased vigilance of DVLA and the Police has resulted in my forfeit of a fixed penalty fine and a change of plates. I have previously been stopped and warned about the digit spacing and my choice was to ignore the warning, so by no means am I complaining or shouting rude names. Times are changing quickly and the Police have their job to do. But I was mildly amused on each occasion because the constable had cited my crime as being a part of the digit spacing which was in fact perfectly legal. On the second occasion the officer pointed to the part of the plate which made the NPR machine stumble, that part of the plate was perfectly within the prescribed format - the illegal part had been read with faultless accuracy!

But I was still naughty Guv'nor. It's a fair cop.

Buoyant Forecast for

DVLA Commercial Revenue

Tunstead Sco Ruston