“The global population is growing continuously. It is not only megacities with over ten million inhabitants that need to concern themselves with alternative solutions to handle complex, modern traffic management – all cities will need to do this sooner or later,” explains Jochen Betz, the Managing Director at Tonnjes. “We believe that electronic vehicle identification, EVI, represents the basis for smart city applications as it enables efficient and contemporary identification processes.” RAIN RFID technology enables wireless communication between vehicle licence plates on the one side and authorised readers on the other. Alongside targeted traffic management, EVI also offers the potential of revolutionising access control and toll collection systems, implementing environmental zones, modernising payment processes relating to bridge and ferry crossings and sustainably protecting against vehicle theft and licence plate forgery.

For several years, Tonnjes has not only been a successful manufacturer of vehicle licence plates but has also played a leading role in developing the software and hardware that are a key prerequisite for electronic vehicle identification.

The technology has already proven of use in various countries in a range of different applications. The Saudi Arabian oil company Saudi Aramco uses Idestix for access control on its business premises. And, in the Philippines, scooters and motorbikes are equipped with the Idestix headlamp tag from Tonnjes – an RFID vignette for the front headlamp.

Both, the forgery-proof licence plates and the stickers, which are destroyed when removed, are equipped with a specially manufactured passive RAIN RFID chip, the Ucode DNA from NXP. This transfers data over several metres in a contactless and secure way.

“With our technology and combined expertise, we are helping authorities and registration offices to work much more efficiently in the future,” explains Ralf Kodritsch at NXP. In his opinion, the use of RFID-based technologies also forms the ideal basis to comprehensively and quickly digitalise the entire field of vehicle identification