California drivers can now sport digital license plates on their cars
npr.org
npr.org
The RPlate – Reviver’s consumer digital license plate product – offers two device options: a battery-powered, self-installed model with a replaceable 5-year battery available at $19.95/month; and a hard-wired, professionally installed model with integrated telematics features and a backlit display, at $24.95/month. Both devices offer users a new platform to connect their vehicle with a set of services including registration renewal, vehicle location services, and security features such as easily reporting it stolen.
https://reviver.com/press-release/reviver-announces-official...
VC: what if we charged people $20/month for something they used to get for free, times 15 million cars in CA? And we can sell ads, and track them, and sell that, and when it goes nation wide… (chokes on own drool from possibilities)
I have what will probably be an unpopular opinion or theory. This device would fill the gap for hold-outs like me that don't want a modern vehicle and/or their current vehicle is working fine but is not network connected. Even if the current version did not have GPS, I am certain future versions would silently add it. Track location, speed, what businesses one visits, etc... That is potentially quite valuable data. There will probably be a free version that is paid for with tax revenue or perhaps a free version included with an insurance policy.
If the hard wired version is powered by the OBD-II connector that would plug the gap for the proposed OBD-III GPS enabled diagnostics that never really gained traction and could be used to disable the vehicle.
Ignoring my snark in a comment above, the one real benefit is someone can’t easily steal your registration sticker. They’d have to steal the whole setup.
Sticker theft isn’t a thing where I live (that I’m aware of), so that leaves me personally without a single benefit besides the idea appealing to me for being “neat”/“techy”.
Which doesn’t begin to compare with the problems. I’d be iffy/worried if this was a 100% government thing. The race a private company is involved/started it is so much worse.
The primary benefit coloured stickers seem to have would that it allows extremely low-effort police fishing-- wrong colour plate corner, great excuse to hassle someone in the wrong neigbourhood/car/skin colour.
It maybe made sense back in 1970, back when there was no easy way to validate a plate in real-time. But today, I'm assuming that in any meaningful traffic-stop interaction, they phone home to check the plate before even leaving the cop car, to confirm it wasn't marked stolen or in an Amber Alert style scenario. Adding on "is this plate current, and should it be attached to a Hyundai Sonata according to registration files" is an obvious extension. I'm assuming they have the bandwidth and connectivity to pull that off.
Then you save all the cost of mailing out and managing stickers, and the wasted police effort chasing people who are waiting for them in the mail/had them damaged.
Out of curiosity, which vehicle model(s)/year(s) do you own or fancy?
P.s. do you have a contact email? You post a lot of interesting content! Would love to keep in touch. MD
My obfuscated email is in my profile but I don't really check it and I rarely ever maintain correspondence with folks outside of HN threads.
[1] - https://wikiless.org/wiki/Loose_lips_sink_ships?lang=en
but yeah, this sounds like some MBA folks put their heads together all "hey let's brainstorm what else we can turn into a subscriber model!"
But that requires this to be successful enough to be accepted in every state and have car companies want to build it in from enough demand/margin, etc.
And maybe backlit so it’s easily readable in the dark while driving?
v1 just isn’t compelling to me ignoring all costs/privacy issues, and I like stupid tech stuff.