It was only a matter of time until the digital licence plate - or "smart plate" - began to hit the marketing mill. The digital plate has been in the news across the Atlantic, and whilst it's been billed as a major advantage to drivers, not everyone agrees.
The plate, which comes with built-in tracking technology, and which cannot be deployed without a mobile phone and a dedicated app from either the Apple store or the Google store, has been portrayed by digital rights groups as a threat to liberty. But there's been considerable persistence from the company initially contracted to produce the plates - Reviver.
And whilst Reviver has been the brand fronting the marketing effort, there's a much bigger name shaping up to corner this market: Google.
Meanwhile, the UK now has its own voice of advocacy for digital number plates. Based in Peterborough, iPlate is aiming to become the British version of Reviver. Mind you, they'll have a fair bit of catching up to do - even if only on the basis of online estate. With just one, solitary page in its inventory, and no privacy policy, the iPlate website may not inspire as much confidence in the average driver as its creators are hoping.
But the greater question is: who really benefits from digital plates?
According to the manufacturers, drivers will be the winners. With a heavy focus on theft-prevention, at first glance it appears that the plates will bring enhanced protection to motorists who have concerns about the security of their vehicles.
In the States, another of the features leading the digital plate sales drive is customisation. The plates can be visually rejigged within the accompanying mobile app, and although current DVLA rules on plate design would not allow the US implementation of a "dark mode", there would be some scope in the UK for visual personalisation. The US plate also offers the facility for custom fonts, although upon deeper reading it becomes apparent that the variable fonts can only be used on a small banner message which appears in small case below the registration. Even in the US, custom fonts can't be applied to the registration itself.
Another hopeful salvo in the marketing drive pays fanfare to the helpful app notifying the driver when their insurance has lapsed. But that's not all the cloud-connected mechanism does in such circumstances. It additionally notifies the entire community, via a red-backed message displayed on the plate itself.
Whilst no law-abiding citizen would have any desire to drive uninsured, the blab-happy "smart plate" might not stop at reporting a lapsed insurance policy to all and sundry. What other tales might it tell on the driver? Can a digital number plate be trusted? Is it really necessary to connect a set of registration plates to the "cloud"? What happens when the "cloud" has an outage? And could any new UK laws that might accompany the digital plate make acquiring private registrations more difficult?
Controversy
The digital number plate has already proved controversial, even though its field of use has been extremely limited to date. But before we reach that discussion, there are a few potential gripes that don't appear at the spearhead of the marketing.
Smart plates will, for example, give you one more battery to replace. And realistically, the banner message which is billed as a major desirable on the US plates, is going to be unreadable to most road users and pedestrians - if they even notice it. In the States, Reviver does not provide a front plate, which means that if you go digital, you'd still be decidedly low-tech at the front end, so to speak. Oh, and the plates would not be cheap. In America their cost has been compared to that of an iPad. On trad, non-smart plates, you could buy a nice personalised reg for that.
Moving onto some of the more thought-provoking elements of "smart plates", a good place to start would be wth the amount of choice drivers would have as regards purchase options.
To date, we've seen a designated private company, which has raised concerns with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, serving as a default option for US consumers. And since Google looks to be the current driving force behind the effort, there may also be little choice over who manages the data.
Sceptical experts have accused Google of seeking to create "an entirely new class of monetizable data", which it could combine with existing Google profile data to supercharge its grip on the information market.
Other voices of disapproval have raised the alarm about the potential for hacking. A system like this is largely uncharted territory, and it's not at all clear what the consequences might be if something so far-reaching were to suffer a breach.
But the concept alone of connecting things to a digital network when there's very little first-glance reason to connect them, casts suspicion over the scheme. And the fact that we can't immediately see a "gotcha" with a scheme of this type, doesn't mean there isn't one there.
What we probably can bank on, is the fact that "smart plates" are being pitched to governments on very different criteria from those on which they're being marketed to the general public.
At present, the UK doesn't appear to be taking "smart plates" particularly seriously. But if they take off in America, that could quickly change.
Would you be ready for digital number plates?
