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California Begins Trial Rollout of Digital License Plates (caranddriver.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Car and Driver: California is taking its first steps toward America's first digital license plate. Using display technology akin to the e-ink used in the Amazon Kindle, a Foster City, California, outfit called Reviver Auto has come up with a digital plate that is now available on a limited basis in California, with the first fleet trial taking place on a fleet of 24 City of Sacramento -- owned Chevrolet Volt cars wearing plates supplied at no cost by Reviver. The new monochrome units -- which were also just rolled out in Dubai -- comply with reflectivity standards and are GPS enabled, allowing owners to track a stolen vehicle or at least its plate.
Owners accustomed to an otherwise-paperless lifestyle will appreciate that, thanks to the Reviver's Rplate Pro, registration can be paid via the internet, assuring that one never has to make a last-minute trip to the DMV's no-appointment Hell Line. It should also be a boon to companies with large fleets. What's more, it's easy to upgrade to a special-interest plate if one chooses to do so.
Owners accustomed to an otherwise-paperless lifestyle will appreciate that, thanks to the Reviver's Rplate Pro, registration can be paid via the internet, assuring that one never has to make a last-minute trip to the DMV's no-appointment Hell Line. It should also be a boon to companies with large fleets. What's more, it's easy to upgrade to a special-interest plate if one chooses to do so.
"GPS enabled"
Guess we don't have to worry much about license plate readers if folks are willing to have a(nother)* GPS attached to them at all times.
Do folks really not think about the alternate applications of such gadgetry before they welcome them with open arms ?
*Smartphone attached to your hip being the other one.
Too many people in IT think its about the Technology but IT is about the Information.
The project seems to connect registration with the tag yet most places let you type in a tag number and pay online. That is an expected information flow.
I also wonder how these will work in accidents. The tag numbers are usually the way of identifying the owners of the cars.
Registrations in California already happen online. That's stupid.
More fucking spyware. Makes one wish for a massive solar flare...
Congrats car & driver, you only had 2 years to implement GDPR, and it really isn't hard at all unless you are doing pretty screwed up things. I could read the google cache at least in order to discover the utter ridiculousness of $700 license plates with a $7 monthly fee! I guess you pay all that for the privilege of the state tracking you. I wonder who makes these plates, that's some serious state gov connections to get it going even at the pilot level.
Even without the tracking aspect, digital plates are the worst idea - a fender bender becomes expensive and/or could leave you with a non working plate, plates in general will certainly be harder to read and can potentially stop working, etc etc...
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Yep -- have to tax by the mile, more during rush hours, more on congested roads, etc.
Funny, there's already a way to tax mileage on electric cars without being intrusive assholes. Tire tax, combined with annual inspections of tread depth. But California seems to want to track everything that moves.
Why the blue fuck would someone pay that much money to trade away their privacy and have a plate that's more easily damaged. If they want the GPS tracking that badly (i.e. are cowards), just hide a cheap smartphone with a pre-pay data plan somewhere in the car.
Owners accustomed to normal steel license tags will appreciate not having to pay $7/month for a digital tag. I mean really, get a notice in the mail once a year, mail in some money and a few weeks later put a sticker on my license tag. Once a year.
I can't wait: "thanks to the Reviver's Rplate Pro, registration can be paid via the internet". Maybe, maybe if they would have said I could pay for it with "an app" I'd be sold. But really, almost all tag renewals can already be paid "via the internet", and they just mail you your replacement tag/decals. If CA can't do this today, start?
No, you can't say that. Because it's not state mandated, in fact it costs $700 + $7 a month so almost no private citizens are going to jump at the opportunity.
What it is, is a city of Sacramento mandated tracking device for city of Sacramento employees while driving city cars. They expect it to reduce fleet tracking costs. I have no problem with that form of surveillance.
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Hacker heaven!
What's the use case for an e-ink license plate?
--Jim (me)
I wonder how long until someone hacks it with goatse.
by mile is hard across lines and it may kill toll roads.
also do you want rent cars to have forced admin fees?
TFS makes things sound all unicorns and rainbows, but farther down TFA things get a little muddy -- which make me think the editors didn't read it through:
We also expect them to be targets for vandalism in San Francisco and Oakland. After all, it’s basically akin to putting Google Glass on one’s car, or, at the very least, a sign reading “Kick me, I’m the reason your landlord’s evicting you.”
The units are also expensive. ... a Reviver setup will run you $699 for the digital plates, plus about $7 a month in recurring fees. That’s a pretty steep gouge just to trade away what little privacy you have left in exchange for not having to check the mail and place a fiddly little decal on your plate once every 12 months.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Wouldn't reading the odometer during inspection be more reliable? Any idiot can buy tires across state lines and pretend they haven't driven at all. It takes a little more work to modify a digital odometer.
just to get my registration and haven't in decades. And in my neck of the woods we just passed laws requiring the DMV be properly funded and that you couldn't steal money intended for the DMV and stuff it in the general fund. After that the problem was solved. And that was decades ago too. The last time I needed a new license picture (lost my hair) it took 30 minutes during peak hours.
The DMV only sucks in "Starve the Beast" places that intentionally under fund government services so they can point and say "See! We told you government's the problem!". No shit when you set it up to fail on purpose it fails.
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Stolen cars are going to have the gps tracked plate ripped off, maybe chucked in the back of a random pickup to throw off authorities.
Where I'm from a car gets a plate when you first register it, when the registration runs out you pay for a renewal and keep the existing plate. They post a new label to put in the windscreen when you renew online.
As for vanity plates, it'll be cheaper for them to switch it but you can bet they'll charge you more for the "convenience" of OTA updates.
Once these become ubiquitous, California will more easily be able to implement their proposed Tax on miles driven.
10 years? I'm going on 18 with my plate right now and no end in sight. (Though I'll admit the annual registration stickers are getting a bit thick as they tell you not to remove the old ones when applying the news ones, and the renewal month sticker has faded completely to white)
My father's plate is now 34 years old. As for reflective coating. Government gave up on that 25 years ago, "cost savings"
Solution without a problem comes to mind.
The plate is just an excuse, the plate would work just fine without GPS and most cars already have GPS anyway.
Having GPS for navigation is a far more compelling reason to put GPS into a car, as it serves an extremely useful purpose for most people unless you never drive to places you're not familiar with.
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"Sorry, this content is not available in your region." The shit is ridiculous, I don't understand why they would block EU users from viewing their content.
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.
Aside from the implications of the built-in GPS tracker, do note that the plates are designed to show advertising. They show the full-sized number while the vehicle is in motion, but when stopped, the number can be reduced in size, shoved in a corner, and the rest of the plate used to display ads. At the moment, for corporate fleets, the idea is for the corporation to display whatever they want. It won't be long before private plates also become advertising platforms.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
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What a backward people you are.
We have one plate, on a car, it stays on that car pretty much for its life.
You then pay "road tax" (not actually true, but that's what it's called by people), online, verified with your recent vehicle test results, that you're insured on the insurance databases etc. and if you fail to do so, any police car with ANPR will flag you as you drive past, certain places (like London's congestion charging zones) will check your plate as you drive through, any traffic warden knows you're not up-to-date, and your car can be towed away.
No stickers. Nothing to "steal" / "forge". No new plates. No chips inside plates. No offline process necessary (but you can still do it in any ordinary post office like for the past 50 years).
I thought America was supposed to be at the forefront of technology and progress?
" The city says it will not use the plates to track workers. "
Am I the only one who tacked on "for now" to the end of it?
Side note: Anyone want to start a pool on how long it is before one of these plates gets hacked?
Have gnu, will travel.
Its not like the license plate number changes on a regular basis so why do they need to have an LCD/e-ink display?
It also isn't necessary to have a digital license plate to do online registration of the vehicle. Ontario (and I assume a vast number of other areas) has had the ability to do online renewals of registration for years.
I thought all license plates were already digital, encoded in base 36 or something close to that.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
I can already pay my registration over the internet with my plain old metal plate.
All I see from the article is " it will cost a lot, and we will charge you a monthly fee to do what you do now for free. The benefit is it saves the DMV time and effort".
If so, why are the end users paying for it?
The number of ways this is open to abuse is mind-boggling....
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
If you're a techie long enough, you eventually realize there are some things tech is fantastic for, some things it's hit or miss on, other things it should never need be applied to. It sounds like you've discovered that already.
registration can be paid via the internet, assuring that one never has to make a last-minute trip to the DMV's no-appointment Hell Line.
What moron actually goes into DMV to pay car registration? I've been paying online for about the last 10? 15? years? It's been so long that I've forgotten when I started paying that way. And what this has to do with a waste-of-money 'digital' license plate is beyond me.
As I said, the government here gave up on reflective 25 years ago to save money. So our plates aren't reflective, and they never replace them.
There was a push a couple years ago to design new plates with reflective and such, but there was so much public backlash against spending so many millions for no reason that the government was forced to give up. Nobody wanted the government to waste that kind of money when the current plates worked just fine.
How many days until the hackers figure out how to crack this thing? Once you can display any ol' license plate number you want, what good is an ALPR? It's a criminal's wet dream. Imagine your getaway car can change the plate number every minute.
J