Operator's manual — original car art
Petrol & Ink

Car poster guides.

Everything written on this site outside the journey itself, listed here: two guides on getting the physical object right (size and frame), one page of DVLA fleet numbers, and two on giving it to somebody else.

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Five pages live here now, and they mostly split evenly. Two are about the object on the wall - how big it should be and what surrounds it. One is the DVLA’s own count of how many cars from each year still hold a licence. Two are about giving one to a person who is difficult to buy for. The four stages hold the rest of the reading.

The object

  • Car poster sizes, and how to pick one - the five sizes from A4 to 70x100, and why the right one depends on the wall and the viewing distance rather than the picture.
  • How to frame a car print - a frame is a decision about how much attention the picture gets, and the artwork's own ground colour makes some of it easy.

The data

One page, and it argues nothing. It reproduces a government statistical series: the counts are the DVLA’s, and so are the caveats attached to them.

  • How many cars from each year are still licensed - the DVLA’s own counts by year of first registration, every year from 1950 to 1999 in a table, with the three caveats the DVLA attaches to the figures and the 1972-73 bump left as an observation rather than a cause.

The gift

If you would rather read the site in order, start at the car and follow the stages through: the art, the wall, the gift.

Written by Craig Fearn, Petrol & Ink. Last updated .