California License Plates Go Digital

Where the eastern edge of the Sacramento suburbs begins to bleed into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, you’ll find one of the most famous prisons in the world. Its inmate roster, at various points, has included notable Hell’s Angel Sonny Barger, actor Danny Trejo, acid guru Timothy Leary, and hip-hop impresario Suge Knight. In 1953, Johnny Cash, who went on to record a historic live album at Folsom Prison in 1968, wrote a song in which a character shot a man over the hill in Reno and eventually wound up incarcerated at the Old West–era penitentiary.

Since Folsom’s a state prison, he presumably got nicked for a different crime, one committed in California. And as a state prison—California’s second oldest, after San Quentin—Folsom serves a critical function: It’s home to the inmate-labor facility where each and every California license plate is stamped out. Well, until now. California is taking its first steps toward America’s first digital license plate.

Car and DriverThe Manufacturer

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.

The fly in the ointment is the part of the tech that makes the plate more useful than your bog-standard stamped-aluminum job—the location-services part of the deal. The City of Sacramento has to talk to its employees’ union due to the potential for tracking that’s built into Reviver’s system. The city says it will not use the plates to track workers.

According to the terms of the pilot program, up one-half of 1 percent of the state’s automobiles can carry the new plates, which works out to about 175,000 cars and trucks—Reviver doesn’t seem to offer a motorcycle-size display. While some forward-thinking fleets may adopt a chunk of the available units, we expect the majority will go to dorks in San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties, while the remainder will get picked up by flash boys in SoCal. 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.”

We remain bothered that the great state of California, home to many of the world’s finest graphic artists, is still using that inappropriately horizontally scaled typeface for the DMV URL beneath the plate number. You wouldn’t see Switzerland or Germany pulling that desktop-publishing, amateur-hour nonsense. Perhaps Reviver can see about fixing that. And lest you think this whole business is just some techy-granola California B.S., know that red-blooded, two-fisted Arizona, Florida, and Texas are lined up as the next states to introduce the Rplate Pro.

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Typographic and class considerations aside, the privacy implications of the new plate worry us most. The units are also expensive. Currently only available on vehicles purchased through a handful of dealers in Sacramento, the Bay Area, greater Los Angeles, and Orange County, 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.

And besides, how are the guys up in Folsom going to rehabilitate themselves if Silicon Valley is supplying our license plates? It’s not like there are gonna be any more Johnny Cash shows.