Original story from Electrek.
Digital license plates are a relatively new concept that could open up the transport industry to an array of new features. Beyond the Big Brother-like properties the implementation of the technology could enable, like location tracking or alerts for expired registrations, it could also greatly facilitate fleet management and transfer of ownership – things that are crucial for the future of mobility to embrace autonomous driving and ride-sharing.
We learned that among Apple’s hundreds of recent hires with automotive experience, the company hired a veteran software engineer with an expertise in fleet management software and especially digital license plates.Before going to work at Apple as a “Secret Agent” on “special projects” according to his LinkedIn profile, Rónán Ó Braonáin was Director of Engineering at Reviver, a stealth startup working on what Braonáin called “the world’s first digital license plate”.
Prior to his stint at Reviver, Braonáin spent 5 years as a software engineer at BMW before becoming Chief Technology Officer at Vision Fleet, a company offering electric vehicle fleet management software and financing to businesses.
From an economic standpoint, the adoption of a digital license plate standard makes sense – at least for the government. The state could save millions on administrative costs related to car registrations and bring in significantly more revenue by changing the display to “expired registration” or something similar to incentivize drivers to pay their registration fees.
The technology has the potential to significantly reduce the workload of the DMV and could also be useful to further automate tolls and parking fees, but the potential for innovation goes way beyond administrative efficiency.
Digital license plates could facilitate the process of sharing a vehicle or participating in a subscription based car-sharing program by allocating plate identifications to drivers over vehicles or maybe even a combination of both. In a world where car-sharing programs are becoming increasingly more popular, digital license plate technology could find itself a key technology to facilitate the adoption of new models of mobility.
There are some hurdles to overcome before the technology can make it to market. Visibility and durability under harsh weather and road conditions being the main technical challenges, but if Apple is indeed working on the concept for Project Titan, it could potentially give more legitimacy to the technology and help the effort to try to make it a standard.
Also noteworthy, Braonáin worked on BMW’s time-of-charge program for electric vehicles. Here he describes his latest position at the company:
Programmed smart charging applications in Java EE to make EV charging (a) more green, based on wind energy availability, (b) cheaper, based on adherence to a TOU tariff plan, (c) customisable, based on customer preferences and mobile app control.
Furthermore responsible for smart home HW/SW; its installation at the office; and integration of the EV into the smarter future home.
BMW started testing this program, now called “BMW i ChargeForward”, with a select few BMW i3 owners in the Bay Area.
Mark Gurman contributed to this report.
Picture: Digital license plate from Reviver.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
I predict we will sea an apple car by the end of 2018
I hope not. Apple has continued to show they release unfinished products. 3D Touch is finished in the sense that it works well, but some of the implementation they have for it is just clearly unfinished. Also, the Apple TV is clearly unfinished with all that it’s lacking.
Here’s the truth: Apple needs more people. Their ideas of using few, highly intelligent people do not work any longer. They are moving into many more products now. You can see the lack of resources in so many aspects. You can see that they didn’t have enough people to get the iPad Pro and an iPad Air 3 out.
iPad Pro is coming this month. And I think theve decided to update iPads every two years now. I mean really what would an iPad Air 3 even have knowing that Apple pencil would be reserved for iPad Pro this year. We don’t need new iPads every year.
@o0smoothies0o “Apple needs more people. Their ideas of using few, highly intelligent people do not work any longer”
They’re expanding at an astronomical rate. Leasing every building that become available in the area. Constructing Apple Campus 2 that will house 13,000 employees. Leasing for an almost equally breathtaking office building at Central & Wolfe that’s expected to be completed by March 2016 and will house another 3,000. A 43-acre office space in San Jose that they are planning on doubling the size of with another acquisition. Not to mention, they are intent on keeping all the small office buildings they’ve been leasing over the past few year going forward. They’ve grabbed up ever single space that became available.
My friend, they are doing all they can to expand their work force and bring us more Apple as fast as they POSSIBLY can.
@Rogifan I’m well aware the iPad Pro is about to be released. I said iPad Pro and iPad Air 3, in that they’re holding off on the iPad Air 3 because all of their resources were put toward the iPad Pro. The only reason there is no iPad Air 3 is because they don’t have the resources.
What would an iPad Air 3 have? Well for starters everything the iPad Pro has, namely the Apple Pencil support. Also 3D Touch. There’s no reason not to put out a new iPad every year by the way. That’s like not putting out an updated Mac just because the 2010 MacBook Pro can do everything 99% of computer users request of a computer, and Macs are updated even less frequently by consumers of course.
There are a few reasons why iPhones are updated so frequently, one was subsidies, another is that it is a status symbol because of how mobile it is, a lot of people want to be seen with the latest one. Still another is that cameras matter more on iPhones of course, and camera upgrades people love. The main one is that people use their iPhones all day, whereas most people only pick up their iPads infrequently when they are at home. No one is justifying upgrading their iPads yearly due to these reasons.
Now where is samsung car?
Well… actually it’s right here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Samsung_Motors
What about an electric car?
In the wiki I linked to it talks about EVs too. They say Samsung dominated the South Korean EV market in 2013.
Steve Jobs said fuck license plates. Since he paid cash for the cars he wasn’t required to have plate on his cars.
Your reason is incorrect.
Yes, he bought or leased a new car every 6 months to avoid having to put a tag on his cars.
Genuine question (because I’m not from the US), but if the car was in a crash, and the driver sped off, how could it be traced without a number plate?
It couldnt be, you would have to report the vehicle description and inform them they did not have a plate. It would be up to law enforcement to track the vehicle down from there, which may or may not be possible….I am not familiar with cars being allowed to go plateless as this is not the case in my specific state but California may have different rules to allow that.
I don’t think that the state would allow these plates without some sort of protection. Maybe require the car to report coordinates to a database when it detects a collision. And only the state can read these coordinates if they have proof that there was a crash in the area at a certain time of the day. This is just me assuming things though, but I don’t think they’ll allow it without a safety measure.
this is the stupidest thing i’ve heard in a while. it addresses a new way to id cars that was solved decades ago. digital plates have possibilities for incremental improvements, but they would create a lot more issues than it solves. the hacking, the failures, the batteries, unneeded complexity and lack of robustness.
A digital license plate seems like an engineering feat… to a nonexistent problem. Unless you’re a criminal of course.
The only innovation in license plates is putting a transmitter in them. It’s very easy to accomplish technically and with correct application of asymmetrical cryptography signing you also make it much harder to fake the plate—by binding a plate cryptographically to the certifying agency and to a subset of the vehicle’s attributes. Since the transmitter does the same thing as the already mandatory plate, there are no new privacy concerns (if done correctly). And keep the ordinary plate for identification by people without receiver on hand.
Now, changing a car’s appearance (other than the plate) digitally, that would be actual innovation. Shut up and take my money already! :-p