Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi has announced that the province’s new number plates will officially be unveiled tomorrow on 5 June, 2025.
The new plates are intended to crack down on the use of fraudulent and cloned vehicle licences in the province, which has become a major issue in recent years.
Vehicles with false plates are often used to commit serious crimes in Gauteng, including kidnappings, robberies, and murder.
Lesufi and the Gauteng MEC for Roads and Transport, Kedibone Diale-Tlabela, confirmed that the new tamperproof plates will be unveiled tomorrow in a social media post on the official Gauteng Provincial Government (GPG) X profile (formerly Twitter).
Better late than never
The plan to introduce new plates was announced all the way back in 2023 but has been repeatedly delayed, missing several deadlines in the process.
The number plates were initially meant to launch by the end of 2023, but this deadline came and went with no sign of the new licences.
Later on, it was stated that the plates would be publicly unveiled in April 2024 – something which has still not happened more than a year later.
The last major update came in November 2024, when the GPG confirmed that Transport Minister Barbara Creecy had granted an exemption to vehicles owned by the provincial government from complying with the provisions of the existing number plate policies.
The exemption allowed GPG vehicles to be legally equipped with the new plates on as part of a pilot programme, letting officials test the plates in a real-world environment before they are rolled out to the public.
The GPG previously stated that the pilot phase would run until the end of the financial year ending 31 March 2025, after which they would be introduced to the public in short order.
However, the province then went quiet on the project for several months, with it being conspicuously absent from Lesufi’s State of the Province Address on 24 February 2025.
The financial year deadline set out by the GPG suggested that the plates would appear as soon as April, but this evidently did not come to pass.
In any case, the new plates should make their debut tomorrow – two years after they were first announced.
What to expect
While the plates themselves have yet to be shown to the public, the GPG has provided a breakdown of the new design.
As mentioned, the licences are meant to be tamperproof to reduce the issue of cloned and fraudulent plates in the provinces.
A government gazette described the plates as “self-destructing,” which means the plates will no longer be functional should a person attempt to remove or alter them.
The gazette listed the criteria for the plates’ new security measures, which are as follows:
- Self-destruct if an attempt is made to remove such a decal
- Have a dimension of 36mm x 16mm with a coloured background of white letters and figures depicting the year of expiry of the number plate
- Have a sequential number containing letters identifying the province and a sequence of at least nine figures
- Have a rectangular two-dimensional barcode of a size 8mm x 8mm, which must be used to link the decal to the unique identification code of that number plate
The gazette did not elaborate on how the decals will “self-destruct,” but it did specify that it should be engineered in such a way that it will scratch, break, deface, or otherwise disrupt the design should anyone attempt to remove it
The new plates will also have a QR code, which will presumably be one of the elements that is used to verify the authentic of each licence.
Headline image is a visual rendering of Gauteng’s new licence plates created by TopAuto’s multimedia team.
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