There is clearly some sort of graft involved here. Some Sacremento official's sibling or spouse sits on the board for whatever company is building these. If Ca

There is clearly some sort of graft involved here. Some Sacremento official's sibling or spouse sits on the board for whatever company is building these. If California is like other states, you get your little registration sticker in the mail, stick it on, and you are done for the year (or two). Paying $84 each year for someone to put the sticker on for me seems quite excessive. Autonomous already have tracking systems built-in them. They call home so why bother with an additional tracking system, especially a state-run one? It can't even control the vehicle so you wouldn't be able to do anything important. The battery life on those can't be very long either so I'm sure it isn't reporting it's position very often. To run a system for managing autonomous cars and their routes, you need fine location and you need it often (i.e. the built-in tracker that runs off of a huge rechargeable battery). Turn the license plate into a giant tamper-evident sticker if you're worried about theft, it could be designed to still show the plate number if someone tries to rip it off. Spending over $1000 over a five year life of a car, per car, is a little much for a redundant tracking system, the convenience of changing the registration year for you, and the PRIVILEGE of running ads on the back of your car (making even more money off you). You could probably save money hiring someone to run all over the city putting yearly stickers on the fleet once a month.