The Triumph Dolomite Club - Discussion Forum

One of our local car-parks has changed from a ticket-on-entry scheme to an Automatic Number Plate recognition scheme. So far so good. So when I went to pay-on-exit, I entered the reg; ( we were in the Dolomite ) and it gave me an error burp and said " Not found " . What ???? It invited me to do a search and still came back as " Not found" . There was then a sub-menu to re-enter the reg; the time of entry and pay the standard fee. So I did.
Does anyone know the technology involved here ?
For instance doesn't it recognise number plates in the format "ABC 123 D" ?
Does it only recognise the modern format "AA 00 ABC"
Or was the camera faulty ? But other people seemed to be having no trouble with it.
Thanks,
Tony.

Camera mounted too high and bumper is covering front plate? Not accepting old font? Either way, probably not much you can do.

Steve

I think by the sounds of it you entered the registration manually though and still no joy? I would have thought any car showing up on the DVLA site would have shown up ok. Strange. Modern technology eh, bring back press a button and a ticket pops out!

I got the Land Rover in and out of T5 Heathrow with no problems, it even found it on their cool car finder machine thing and the numberplates are't exactly erm tidy....

Should have taken a photo in hindsight!

Edit: Maybe I should try the Caterham and see if it recognises the plate on the nosecone.

Be interesting to see James!!

Dolly-Dimple wrote:I think by the sounds of it you entered the registration manually though and still no joy? I would have thought any car showing up on the DVLA site would have shown up ok. Strange. Modern technology eh, bring back press a button and a ticket pops out!

It said 'not found' on exit when he typed it manually because it couldn't match it to the ANPR record from him entering. All it is doing is matching entry/exit records - DVLA not required. It can just look at the time difference and bill accordingly.

Steve

Dolly-Dimple wrote:Modern technology eh, bring back press a button and a ticket pops out!

That's what we have in this part of the world The powers that be tried to introduce the newfangled putting in your reg. number on the ticket machines last year - it caused chaos and they had to backtrack!!

Here's something, last weekend I used the Dartford crossing to get the MG. Drove her back over it to get home and then proceeded to forget about paying the toll until 2am!!

Thought, OK, my bad, I'll just phone up and see if there's a penalty charge waiting for me to pay.

Nope, nothing outstanding for the car!

Hmmm interesting, maybe the ANPR cameras on the bridge cant read suffix plates? It's not like they're hidden!

Thinking about it as well, the ANPR cameras at the BP garage I used didn't find the reg either. You can normally see on the screen above the teller.

When I went down to pick up the Sprint, I thought, odd, what happened to the barriers, have they finally lived up to the promise of no charges? Few days later a warning letter arrived, pay up the crossing fee but next time there will be a fine.

Signs on the crossing are less than obvious now, bordering on the sneaky...

I was in one of the big car-parks in Reading last week; this one you just drive up to the entrance barrier take a ticket with the entry time on it and the barrier rises. Now they have a new system and it was only when I went to exit I noticed that the Dolomite reg; had been printed on the ticket.
And it was wrong.
It had read the "S" as an "B" . Anyway, I paid the fee got a receipt and on arriving at the exit barrier it just lifted and we were away. I didn't even have to insert the ticket to exit as most people seemed to have to do.
So not only did it read the plate wrongly on entrace, it did the same on exit and got it wrong twice.
So these ANPR systems are not infalliable. Probably doubtful for use in court as well.
The systems are also not linked to the DVLA database as the wrong reg; it recorded doesn't exist.
Tony.

I found that the Toledo I am caring for friends had tyres that were over 15 years old and though they had tread, they were no grip ditch finders especially in the wet, so I got onto National tyres and bought a set, and on the order form it asked for the registration, I then typed in the "K" reg of the car and it said it did not exist! I then typed in my "Q" reg from the car I built and it was accepted.
The more automated we become the harder some jobs are going to get.

Until recently our local bar Parks were anpr and charged you automatically for Parking. It worked. For all the modern cars we have, but the dolomite was never picked up. I just took this as being their problem rather than mine and never questioned it. They have recently switched to a new system with barriers and I have yet to try it out with the triumph.

Its short sightedness from the app developers and business analysts . Some of them can't even drive let alone know registration number permutations. A lot of these apps are developed off shore too because its cheap and we get to see why.

I took my TR7 into the local Kwikfit to get the tracking checked after I had the front suspension apart and where they have one of these fancy computerised ramps. Problem was the guy could not find the TR7 on its computer. When I suggested he just set it up parallel or a wisker toe-in he said that was not possible and it had to be done by the computer. I got him to search all the possible combinations and we eventually found it listed under Rover but I have heard of someone else who could not get his car MOT tested for the same reason.

Any MoT garage should be able to log any car for testing. If it doesn't show on the MOT database that the garages use, there is a facility for entering it manually. That's what happened when I had my Elan tested for the first time in nearly 40 years. The tester will want to know the weight of the car for the brake test.

As for taking a classic car to Kwikfit, one has to ask why on earth would you do that? Personally I wouldn't take a child's toy pedal car to them. Find a local independent tyre fitter and get to know him. Then you might get something like service and help. My local guy is extremely helpful, and buying tyres and batteries from him is no more expensive than going to one of the big national companies. Plus he doesn't mind taking time poring over catalogues to make sure you get what you want.