LTO moves license plate backlog completion to 2020

The Land Transportation Office (LTO) is fast-tracking its production license plate production using a robotic plate-making machine. This IDeRobot plate making machine is able to produce 700 plates per hour – that's about 5,600 plates in a regular eight-hour shift per day. Do some further math and that's 39,200 plates a week. That is, however, still quite a long way to recover from 2.9 million plate backlog.

All of this effort is directed at a backlog that stems from vehicles that were registered back in February 2014 to July 2016. These vehicles do not have their plates yet due to a notice of disallowance from the Commission on Audit. In addition, the LTO also wants to purchase another plate-making machine to help further the cause. Not to be left behind, however, there are still five manual plate making machines paired with seven manual embossing machines.

Galevante said that the agency has projected that 1.9 million new cars would be registered in the whole of 2019 and the LTO has already prepositioned license plates on different regions to address the demand.

To recall, the LTO set a four-month deadline for the license plate backlogs in March 2019. The agency said it produced 1.7 million plates as of March 2019. These 1.7 million plates were a combined effort between automated and manual plate production methods. The new deadline offsets the previous date that the agency set.

The LTO still has quite a number of plates to make if it wants to meet its zero plate backlog by 2020. But with the addition of a second automated plate making machine they should be able to meet this deadline. Or hopefully so.