South Africans should say goodbye to physical driving licence cards and vehicle discs

An experienced driving instructor and road laws expert has called on Parliament to facilitate the development of an electronic system to eliminate physical driving licence cards and car licence discs.

Driving.co.za managing director Rob Handfield-Jones recently submitted an urgent request for the transport portfolio committee to intervene in South Africa’s driving and vehicle licensing regime.

“I would like to put it to the committee that the Department of Transport fundamentally misunderstands what it is doing here and is in need of some pressure from the legislator,” he wrote.

Handfield-Jones made his submission in light of the repeated breakdowns of South Africa’s only driving licence card printer and the challenges in procuring a replacement.

The 27-year-old machine has been offline for more than two months and is only expected to be repaired by mid-May 2025.

In addition, Handfield-Jones has expressed concern over the procurement of new printers costing “hundreds of millions of rand.”

That process has also been delayed as the transport department has asked the High Court to cancel a tender that was awarded to French firm Idemia.

The move came after the Auditor-General determined none of the bidders for the machine and revamped driving licence card had come in under the R486-million budget.

Transport minister Barbara Creecy has revealed that Idemia’s three machines will cost over R1 billion.

Handfield-Jones strongly opposes perpetuating South Africa’s physical licence card and licence disc.

In his submission to Parliament, he stressed that these documents were not licences but physical tokens that had a basic purpose.

“The need for a physical token dates from the days when an officer at the roadside had no other means of validating a driver or vehicle’s licensing status than the documents at hand,” he said.

“Unsurprisingly, these documents were and are subject to forgery and falsification, as well as damage and wear.”

Simple, cheap fix already available

Handfield-Jones said that the underlying digital record on the Electronic National Traffic Information System (eNatis) was the actual driving and vehicle licence.

By enabling a secure link between peace officers and the system using the Internet, the government could completely eliminate the need for intermediate tokens — physical or digital.

“This would offer a full and highly reliable replacement for licence tokens and do away with the need for resources and equipment to create these tokens,” he said.

Instead of scanning a token like a card or disc, the officers would only require a person’s fingerprint, ID number, or a car’s registration number.

To ensure proper security, the system would need to be built to be exclusively accessible by peace officers using their credentials.

The system could be accessed using any device with an adequate camera and fingerprint reading capability, including a smartphone, tablet, or laptop.

“Fingerprint recognition and Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) are mature technologies well within the capabilities of modern devices,” Handfield-Jones said.

“Therefore, such a system could be implemented rapidly and for a fraction of the cost of what the
government intends to spend on a new driving licence card production machine.”

Plethora of benefits

Handfield-Jones listed several other benefits of scrapping physical cards and discs, including:

• Elimination of future capital and operational expenditure on driving licence card and vehicle licence disc production.
• Cost and time savings for citizens who would no longer need to pay for and queue to renew driving licence cards and vehicle licence discs.
• Reduced environmental impact from eliminating the processes and materials associated with driving licence card and vehicle licence disc renewal.
• Improved efficiency and reduced costs at licensing centres which would no longer need to devote resources to the renewal functions related to driving and vehicle licences.

Handfield-Jones also argued that an online eNatis-linked system accessible by peace officers would improve law enforcement.

“ANPR capability could allow officers to identify vehicles in approaching traffic whose licences are out of date or whose owners have active warrants, eNatis blocks, or expired driving licences,” he explained.

“This productivity enhancement would yield greater law enforcement returns by heavily targeting non-compliant drivers and vehicles instead of employing the hit-and-miss approach.”