Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Fully electronic vehicle license plates, anyone?

While you were fretting about the size and shape of an obscure button on the Apple iPhone user interface or hotly debated whether airbrushing a sweat stain on your favorite politician is yet more proof of the mainstream media going loco, we were plotting....nothing.

Since doing nothing is rapidly becoming the worst of anti-social behaviors in the eyes of the hyper productive relentless world of today, we do claim that doing nothing is our contribution to saving the world by minimizing our carbon footprint.

The guilty pleasure of the blogster is, however, reading. This can cause long suppressed ideas to find their way into a blog post.

Like that of the fully electronic license plate. No more wasting of scarce resources, minimal administration.

Just a small screen saving society time and money. As in trips to the DMV. With the right tech and a credit card, your vehicle gets registered, the tax deducted, a license "plate" created at the press of the ignition button.

You didn't really expect "ignition key", did you?

Add a remove engine kill switch to that, and soon the concept of a high speed car chase will be the hilarious sight of a 1960s VW beetle crawling along the roads inches ahead of a Crown Vic whose shock absorbers were replaced with suspenders some time in the 1980s.

Having shaped the future of motor vehicles** in three sentences, let's talk about a side project: license plate projectors.

Various governments around the world are using real time vehicle traffic databases so government employees and contractors enjoy the benefit of being able to check where their spouses, their kids, their ex-es, and their drugs are at all times. Their drugs refers to the ex-es, just to be clear.

In movies and cop shows, you see good guys or bad guys slap on different license plates to disguise their vehicles.

Don't Holly-, Bolly-, and Hong Kong Wood have these new small projectors mounted above or below an existing plate to project a "new" license plate onto the vehicle as needed?

It is no big technical challenge and much safer than having to interrupt a car chase to change plates. The old Wurlitzer style plate changer of Jimmy Bond may appeal to viewers whose mobile phone buttons must be at least  half an inch square.

But why has nobody noticed that even the Transformers can not do it? They can go from car or truck to walking and - unfortunately - talking robots, but they are unable to take care of modern license plates?

So, go and make that license plate projector in HD, but do not use it on the street.

** Don't tell anybody that we will not need plates any longer soon, cars will have 24/7 electronic connection. But we need vanity plates!

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