California legalizes digital license plates for all vehicles | Hacker News Reader

California legalizes digital license plates for all vehicles

theregister.com

11 pointsLinuxBender10 comments

This will not be used how you think it will be used.

Leasing companies and banks will own the plates and disable them remotely if there's no payment.

the 19.99/mo fee will just be added to the full term of the lease. just $719 per 3yr lease. Those companies force you to pay that per week in insurance anyway.

I miss those slashdot fake taglines: "from the 'problems I don't have' department"

Also, I'd have to dig into the legislative text to know, but surely they didn't say "we legalize Rplate(R) digital license plates," right? If there's any sanity in the world, hackaday will have a $15 replacement within a month, barring the bill allowlisting just Rplate

The text of the bill says that CHP makes that determination.

> The alternative device is subject to the approval of the department and the Department of the California Highway Patrol and shall not be used in lieu of a device issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles until that approval has been granted.

Yeah, slashdot was awesome this way.

The mythical +5, troll abounds.

Subscriptionization(?) continues: "Right now, an Rplate for a personal vehicle (the battery version) runs to $19.95 a month for 48 months, which will total $975.60 if kept for the full term. If opting to pay a year at a time, the price is $215.40 a year for the same four-year period, totaling $861.60. Wired plates for commercial vehicles run $24.95 for 48 months, and $275.40 if paid yearly."

In the UK a plate goes on a new car and pretty much stays there forever. Can someone help me with the problem this solves please.

If I was looking for problems to solve, I could think of a few.

- Commercial fleets can be managed remotely. I imagine U-Haul has a lot of manual work to manage their entire fleet of trucks, making sure that all registration stickers are up to date.

- You can personalize the plate slightly. There's room for a small message that you can change via the app.

- If you report the vehicle stolen they can remotely change the plate to reflect that. Obviously there are a ton of attack vectors here, but if you trust corporations and the government with this sort of thing then this raises the chance of recovering your vehicle.

- It's another surface for Amber alerts.

Note that I don't think these are particularly *good* solutions to problems, and I've seen a few of these plates and am not a fan, but.... /me raises his hands in exasperation.

That being said, I would start looking into one if I could configure it to blank out when parked at home. It's my car on my property, there's no reason anyone needs to be able to read the license plate. But that isn't currently legal in California.

It doesn't really solve anything, I suspect some palms got greased to get it up for a vote and the rest are just "oooo-ahhhhhh new tech!" people in the legislature that voted for it. It's fairly harmless so the governor signed it into law.

Even when you sell the car? In Ontario, the licence plate is yours and you take it off if you sell the car and put it on your next car.

It is possible to change a plate in the UK but it requires authorisation and I think you must own the other car. Mostly people buy (often for large sums) plates which if you squint a bit look a bit like their name.

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