California Extends Digital License Plate Option to Everyone

It’s been almost a decade since California first considered digital license plates, and now anyone in the state can get one.There’s only one company that’s selling digital plates. Reviver offers two versions of its RPlate: a battery-powered model that requires a $20/month subscription fee or a hard-wired model for commercial vehicles for $25/month.Digital license plates are currently allowed in just three states—California, Michigan, Arizona—and can be used on commercial vehicles in Texas. Another 10 or so states are considering approving the devices.

Anyone in California can now legally put a digital license plate on their car. High-tech license plates have been allowed in limited numbers since 2018, but now the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) will allow any vehicle owner to use digital plates. California first started thinking about alternatives to standard metal license plates in 2013 with the passage of SB 806.

Reviver, the only company that sells digital plates today, announced the passage this week of a new bill that it helped shepherd through the California legislature. The Motor Vehicle Digital Number Plates bill (AB-984) increases the number of people who will be allowed to use a digital plate on their car from the one-half of one percent of the state’s automobiles— around 175,000 vehicles that the original pilot program allowed—to all 40 million vehicles registered in the state. With the passage of AB 984, digital license plates are now legal for passenger cars in three states—California, Michigan, Arizona—and they can be installed on commercial vehicles in Texas.

One of Reviver’s selling points for connected, digital license plates is that they can be immediately updated to display Amber Alerts or an “I’m Stolen” message if needed. Reviver said at least another 10 states are in some way considering adoption of digital license plates. Colorado, Georgia and Illinois have approved the plates, but details about integrating them with the state DMVs has not been completed. Reviver said Pennsylvania and New Jersey are likely to approve digital plates soon.

Reviver has been pushing forward with its digital plate plans, touting benefits like the ability to renew the plates without using a sticker and the fact that the plates have built-in tracking technology that can be used in case the vehicle is stolen. The company said around 10,000 people in California have installed its digital plates, called RPlate, under the current rules.

Technically, the new law doesn’t just help Reviver. AB-984 establishes general requirements for “piloting and adopting new alternative devices for vehicle licensing,” the company said. It’s just that Reviver is currently the only one offering any kind of alternative. The company offers a battery-powered RPlate that can be installed on any vehicle and, since the digital plates need to connect to a cellular network to operate, subscription costs run $19.95 a month. A hard-wired RPlate is available for commercial vehicles and requires professional installation. The hard-wired models offer more integrated telematics features and their displays are backlit. Subscriptions for the hard-wired model cost $24.95 a month. Commercial customers can sign their RPlates up for Reviver’s RFleet Software Dashboard. Reviver touts RFleet as a way to streamline some of the mundane parts of a fleet manager’s job: automated vehicle registration, batch registration renewal and a way to track every vehicle in the fleet through the RPlate if the vehicle doesn’t have built-in telematics for this purpose.

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