LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — GPS features, no stickers and possibly a way to pay your vehicle registration in installments. Those were some of the reasons that digital license plates might get support at the Nevada Legislature.
Democratic Assem. Howard Watts presented Assembly Bill 296 (AB296) Tuesday in Carson City, along with a representative of Reviver, one of two companies that are active in the digital license plate market. The bill would let the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles allow digital plates as an option on vehicles registered in the state.
Regular metal plates would still be available for people who aren’t interested in the move to digital.
Digital plates have screens similar to the display on a Kindle e-book. If the bill becomes law, Nevadans could purchase a plate from an approved vendor and use it on their vehicle. They wouldn’t ever have to apply a new sticker, because the plate would update itself when the registration went through.
The possibility that the bill will expand to include an option to pay vehicle registrations on installments had a lot of attention in the Assembly Committee on Growth and Infrastructure.
“I believe that we have some of the highest registration fees, total, in the country,” Watts said. “And so it makes it more important for Nevada to kind of be a leader on this than others where those fees are a little bit lower.”
Registration on a new vehicle can be more than $1,000, he said. That’s a problem in many households if the bill comes due at a bad time.
“It is a struggle for folks. We know we’re all annoyed by folks who don’t have their cars registered to Nevada. We’re all annoyed by folks that have expired registrations, and all the enforcement that causes to try and address that. For a lot of people, they simply cannot afford to pay,” Watts said.
Sometimes, they decide to risk it, and delay registering their car.
Watts is looking at options to form a partnership with a third party that would essentially become a lender, fronting the registration fee to the Nevada DMV and collecting from the customer in installments.
But Watts doesn’t want to allow it to work like most loans. He wants it to be fee-based rather than involving interest. That would be added to AB296 as an amendment.
Currently, California, Colorado, Georgia, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Michigan and Illinois allow digital license plates. How soon could Nevada join that list?
DMV representatives said it might take a while yet. If the bill passes, the effective date could be off in the future for a frustrating reason: The DMV’s ancient computer system. DMV currently runs two systems, but the option for a digital plate would have to be set up in both systems. The cost of programming in the old system would be a major problem, so the DMV is asking for a delay in introducing digital plates.
There’s another important part of Watts’ bill. The state needs information about how people use electric vehicles. A 2019 bill that allowed collection of mileage data is expiring in 2026, so Watt put in a provision to allow that collection to continue under AB296.
That information will be critical when lawmakers go about setting up a structure for EV drivers to contribute to funds used to maintain highways. Right now, they pay nothing because they don’t buy gasoline. The fuel tax that’s part of every purchase at the pump goes toward road maintenance.
