148 | TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT
Passports for cars At present, license plates can be easily misappropriated for dishonest purposes. Modernizing the system will reduce crime as well as provide many other benefits Words | Annamarie Neumair, Denkbar PR & marketing for Tönnjes E.A.S.T, Germany
There are more than a billion cars in the world – and the number is growing. It doesn’t matter whether it’s passenger or freight transport, urban traffic and public highways put official agencies and government to the test with ever-increasing challenges in traffic and vehicle management. Simultaneously, they are also assigned the task of registering automobiles reliably and efficiently. These are the problems that the German company Tönnjes E.A.S.T. has solved with its revolutionary invention, the IDePlate.
A passport for the car “It is a license plate with an integrated RFID chip so that the car has a unique number that can be called off electronically – like a passport for cars,” says Dietmar Mönning, the managing director of Tönnjes E.A.S.T. The areas where IDePlates are used depend upon infrastructure and political
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specifications. In some jurisdictions there is a high number of vehicles without registration; others apply obsolete technologies. Germany, for instance, only uses the visual characteristics of the license plate to identify them, which is very inefficient and prone to abuse.
Looks can be deceiving At first glance, the IDePlate looks just like any license plate, but its built-in RFID chip contains a one-off encoded identification number, making it the electronic counterpart to the visible characters of the license plate. But that’s not all: another component is the IDeStix windshield sticker. The holographic sticker also has an RFID chip with a one-off encoded identification number, so that both encoded numbers can only be decoded with authorized reading equipment – and should one of the elements go missing, the system will trigger an alarm.
Above: The IDePlate with the IDeStix provide a vehicle with its own unique passport details
NXP Semiconductors, an expert in secure connectivity solutions for embedded applications, produces the integrated RFID chip. The UCode DNA chip used links a read range of over 15m (49ft) with high-security encryption. Mönning says, “In the past, technicians were forced to decide between protecting data or being able to read from a distance. Happily, IDePlate and IDeStix can do both. “Additionally, the identification and verification is done by Kathrein, the largest manufacturer of antennas in the world offering a groundbreaking link between RFID writing/reading equipment and what is known as the IoT gateway by uploading the data onto the cloud.” Along with the IDePlate and IDeStix,
