California Legalizes Digital License Plates

(Credit: Reviver) License plates have existed in essentially the same form for as long as automobiles have been on the roads, but California has rolled out a new approach to vehicle tags. After four years of testing, the state is making digital license plates available to all drivers. These devices are much more expensive than the traditional hunk of metal, but they do offer a few neat features.

The new digital plates are essentially ruggedized monochrome LCDs mounted to the vehicle in place of a normal plate. They display your DMV-approved license number, and you can automatically renew your registration via the associated mobile app.

According to the Los Angeles Times, there’s only one company authorized to offer the plates in California, known as Reviver, and it had two different options. The battery-powered digital plate should work on any car and lasts for five years. There’s a 12-volt wired plate that’s more expensive to install, but it offers additional features like GPS mileage tracking and valet mode. Both plates have integrated low-power LTE to remain connected to Reviver’s DMV-certified cloud service, which it swears is completely secure.

During the prior test period, users had to pay $700 for the hardware, plus a few dollars per month for the subscription cloud service. While the upfront cost is lower now, this is still a wildly expensive upgrade over old-fashioned license plates. The battery-powered plate, which you can install yourself in as little as five minutes, is $20 per month for two years or $215 per year for four years. The wired plate costs about $150 to install on most vehicles, and the monthly cost goes up to $25. Or you can pay $275 per year for four years. The wired plate is currently only available to business customers.

The utility of digital license plates is questionable right now. Reviver offers a few neat extras that could be useful in certain situations, though. For example, there’s the option to mark your vehicle as stolen and update the plate to reflect that. You can also alter the bottom text as often as you like. Although, you can only have one digital plate per car (on the back), and California does require a front plate.

If anything, this is going to be a status symbol for people who care deeply about what they drive. Average drivers will probably continue using the cheaper non-digital plates, but there could come a day when this technology is commonplace. Currently, only two other states allow individual drivers to have digital plates: Arizona and Michigan. Give it a few years, and maybe you, too, will be able to slap an LCD license plate on your car. We can only hope the cost comes down.

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