Partner News: Electronic vehicle identification a step closer

Date: 10 July 2008

ERTICO Partner TNO and RDW (the Dutch vehicle license registration authority) signed an agreement on 30 May 2008 to develop a Proof of Concept for electronic vehicle identification. RDW has for many years been considering other ways of identifying vehicles than just the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) and the license plate. A chip in the car is difficult to find and therefore less susceptible to fraud. TNO will explore the options of electronic vehicle identification for RDW. License plate and vehicle identity fraud are as old as the car and the license plate themselves. From stripping entire vehicles to stealing license plates: law enforcement authorities and RDW together try to limit the damage.

                                                                     TNO and RDW sign the contract

Chip in the car
A vehicle is identified by the VIN punched into or stored in various places in the vehicle corresponding to the license plate number. Since license plates are not permanent fixtures on a car, they are easy to steal and attach to a different vehicle. It’s time for modernisation, a century after the introduction of the license plate.

Over the next few months RDW will be experimenting with electronic vehicle identification (EVI) in a project whose aim is to determine whether vehicle identification can be better safeguarded by, for instance, chips on license plates or chips in the car via a linked network. If one of the chips is destroyed or replaced by a different license number, the system will generate an error signal that can be received remotely by the authorities, and will reveal if the identity of the vehicle has been tampered with. The TNO research centre in Delft will be performing the trials. On 30 May RDW and TNO signed an agreement to this effect.

Peak traffic avoidance
The first EVIs are due to be ready by the end of 2008 for use in the Peak Traffic Avoidance project between Gouda and The Hague where participants are rewarded for travelling outside of peak traffic periods. It is therefore important to establish when a car joins the motorway. In addition to the normal chip used for this purpose, EVI provides extra verification, which prevents participants in the project removing the registration from the car and still getting their bonus fraudulently when driving in peak traffic. Will the chip in the car make the license plate redundant? No. Licence plates will still be on cars in another hundred years from now. Even if every car has an EVI, road users will still need to be able to quickly identify other vehicles by themselves.