In Brazil, All Vehicles Must Have Radio IDs By 2014

morcego writes "Brazil's National Traffic Council (CNT) published Friday a resolution that institutes the National System of Automatic Vehicle Identification (Siniav). According to the Q&A published (Google translation from Portuguese), only 'visible and public' information will be available (vehicle year or fabrication, make, model, combustible, engine power and license plate number), without any personal information about the owner or registration data. This system will be mandatory for all vehicles (cars, trucks, motorcycles, etc) and should cost vehicle owners approximately R$5 (less than US$3)."

for what purpose?

[dutchwhizzman]

Why would you want such a thing? Humans can't read it and it sounds like criminals can easily swap tags or fake tags if they want to disguise themselves. License plates at least gave you the option to report a driver that caused an accident. At best, this is useful for statistics about vehicle usage, not for individual tracking, taxing or that sort of thing.

Re:certainly much simpler than

[FunkDup]

a lot of people live in slums next to the rich people's fenced mansions

Sounds a little bit like South Africa, or to some extent the USA.

This [wikipedia.org] article says:

There is no agreed upon definition about what all these nations have in common apart from having a significant population of European descent.