Sacramento-area digital license plate company ReviverMX Inc. has gotten its plates into a Southern California auto group that operates some of the highest-volume dealerships in the country.
Under an agreement, some high-end auto brands of Los Angeles-based Galpin Motors will sell cars with Reviver’s Rplates on new vehicles, Reviver CEO Robert Wood told the Sacramento Business Journal.
The plates initially will go on cars at Galpin’s Land Rover, Aston Martin, Jaguar and Lotus dealerships, all of which are in Van Nuys.
Galpin Motors is a family-owned group of dealerships in Southern California, which includes the highest-volume Ford dealer in the world, the highest-volume Lincoln and Volkswagen dealerships on the West Coast and the highest-volume Mazda dealership in the country.
“We’re starting with the premier stores and the higher-end brands, and then we’ll work into the other dealerships,” Wood said.
Rplates automatically register the car and re-register it annually with the department of motor vehicles in the owner’s state. The sleek digital screen also allows for custom messages for private vehicles and posting a warning if the car is stolen. Backgrounds and colors can be customized and changed, and the Rplates can include features like geotracking, speed and distance metric measurements and travel history.
New features being developed include paying tolls and roadside assistance. All new functions developed can be updated to existing Rplates.
The four new Galpin dealerships bring Reviver to a total of 34 dealerships that install Rplates on new cars. Some dealers also install Rplates to used cars on their lots, Wood said.
Reviver started working with new-car dealers at the end of last year, and it boosted sales immediately. The 12-year-old company had sold a total of 4,000 Rplates by the end of last year after several years of sales, and it doubled that number by the spring. It was selling more than 2,000 Rplates a month earlier this year, but inventory shortages of cars have slowed sales. That has held sales of Rplates to between 1,000 and 1,500 a month, Wood said.
“We’re trying to stay heads-down and focused and get as many dealers as we can now so that when they start selling cars again, we’re ready,” Wood said.
The Reviver plate uses a bistable digital screen, which requires no flowing electrical current to show an image. It requires current only to change the image.
