A 30-day grace period for people who have yet to electronically register their cars under a new system has been granted by Premier Ewart Brown.

Bermuda yesterday become the first country in the world to launch a nationwide Electronic Vehicle Registration (EVR), an initiative to ensure vehicles are properly registered.

Dr. Brown said 96 percent of the Island's cars already had the new registration stickers – with the other four percent being given until the end of the month to comply with the new law.

EVR is a system that electronically identifies whether a vehicle has valid registration. For now, only four-wheel vehicles will be required to have them.

The stickers have Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags which are attached to the windshield when they are registered at the Transport Control Department (TCD). Information about the vehicle, not the driver, is put into the system including the licence plate number, registration expiration year and insurance information.

Dr. Brown explained before EVR, taxpayers were losing about $2.5 million in revenue each year due to people cheating the system.

"It will now be considerably more difficult for cheaters to circumvent the law, and considerably easier for TCD to bring everyone into compliance. Compliance is the main objective because if everybody pays, everybody saves."

He said since TCD began tagging vehicles last July, 26,817 vehicles have been registered.

The process itself is simple with vehicle owners only spending minutes inside TCD to get the EVR sticker placed on their windshield at no cost.

There are now four electronic reader sites placed around the Island specifically designed to scan the tag on the vehicle as it drives by. For vehicles that are not properly registered, a photograph will be taken of the licence place and ticket mailed to the owner.

Although vehicles can be scanned in a split second, the EVR is not a way for Government to track members of the public. The system is designed to accurately identify and record tagged vehicles, not their drivers. All vehicle information will be stored in a database at TCD.