UK's new drivers now in safe hands... of laser-wielding robots
Credit-card chip biz promises 80m non-forgeable licences
Secure token biz Gemalto has landed the contract to print the next 80 million identity documents for the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), including next-gen driving licences to be deployed next year.
The new licences will feature laser-etched edges, making them even harder to copy, but they'll also be compliant with EU standards regulations. The contract also includes digital tachograph cards (aka swindle sheets), and biometric residence permits, although we're waiting for clarification on how the latter falls into the UK Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency's remit.
The pink licences were horribly easy to forge, unlike the edge-printed ones
Gemalto is better known, in these pages, as making the secure chips embedded in credit cards and SIMs, but in common with most players in that market it also prints difficult-to-forge documents even if (unlike some of the competition) it didn't emerge from that business.
It was formed in 2006 from the merger of Gemplus and Axalto, both important players in the secure token business, and has been busy expanding its offerings up the value chain into secure transaction management, landing the contract to run servers for the US operator cartel ISIS.
Like that deal, this is an open-ended contract, simply being referred to as "multi-year", but the DVLA contract is just about printing the millions of hard-to-forge documents at its Fareham site in Hampshire, which is being developed to integrate with the DVLA systems for personalisation. ®
COMMENTS
sticky tape ?
I want the credit card photo card to carry all the relevant information on me. It's 2012, I shouldn't have to carry a 2nd part of the license on paper.
DVLA - Civil Servants without a clue about technology.
Don't care what form the license takes as long as the new one still reflects an accurate record of what I am allowed to drive.
know of a couple of people who have had to get the license replaced and when the new one has come back classifications have vanished
worst one was a hgv driver (the old HGV class 1 license) who received a replacement license with no hgv allowance, dvla's response was "we have no record of you ever having a hgv license, you will have to re-take the test" luckily he still had his original pass certificate from 30 years before and they accepted that as proof.
general advice is to take a copy of your license before you cut it up and send it back for replacement.
Long term I can see cars having a slot that you have to insert your license into before you can drive them, of course the cars will also change some sort of code on the exterior of the vehicle (lcd QR code on the number plate) to indicate who is driving so there can be no getting out of fines by claiming you didn't know who was driving etc.
this will probably be pushed as an anti-theft service (restrict your car so only certain licenses can be used)
insurance companies will push it as a way of reducing premiums (car restricted so that it will only accept licenses owned by people over 50 with no points on their license etc)
Re: sticky tape ?
Funnily enough, the photo card is legally accepted in every European country, except the one that issued it!
In Blighty you also have to hand over a moth eaten, falling apart at the folds, piece of paper !
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