I have seen this once before on a K plate silver saff, the car belonged to a friends mate. The story with that car was that it had been used for some development work and disposed of by Ford at auction with no warranty. This was about 12 years ago and I think I can remeber something about Ford not wanting it to go through the dealer network as due to the price the dealer would have sold the vehicle on for, the dealer would then have been obliged to honour some sort of warranty and obligation under the trades description act.

The plate on the one I saw was brass and it had an odd chassis number, but i can't remeber what was odd about it?.

HTH