2024-09-01 03:36:06
For a year now, cars have been able to be registered or deregistered online. However, only very few people have used the service so far, as figures exclusively available to t-online show.
One year after the introduction of the online service, only one in 20 vehicle registration processes in Germany is handled completely digitally via the new internet-based vehicle registration portals (i-Kfz-Portals). This is according to figures that the Federal Ministry of Transport announced to t-online on Wednesday.
According to the report, the Ministry of Transport has registered a total of 23.75 million vehicle registrations, deregistrations or re-registrations since the introduction of the i-Kfz portals on September 1, 2023. Of these, only around 1.1 million transactions came via the portals. This corresponds to less than 5 percent of the total.
Internet-based vehicle registration allows citizens and companies to register their cars with the authorities directly from home or the office. The advantage: There is no need to look for an appointment or go to the office, nor is there any need to wait for mail from the authorities. Anyone who registers their car online can drive off immediately.
In addition, the fees are much lower. According to the Ministry of Transport, registering a new car online costs 16.30 euros, while at the counter it costs 30.60 euros. Deregistering a vehicle online costs just 2.70 euros, while at the office it costs 16.80 euros.
Transport Minister Volker Wissing (FDP) told t-online about the figures: “One million digital registration processes mean a million times more time, effort and money saved.” This is “digitalization in action” that makes people’s everyday lives “noticeably” easier. At the same time, Wissing appeals: “It is all the more important that all drivers can benefit from the advantages of online registration.”
With this, Wissing is aiming at a finding that his ministry’s statistics also support: the i-car portals are not received equally well or poorly everywhere. There are big differences depending on the district or city.
In Ingolstadt, for example, more than one in five processes (21.1 percent) is handled digitally. The i-vehicle quota is also relatively high at 20.4 percent in the district of Hildburghausen (Thuringia) and in Offenbach in Hesse (16.6 percent). As a federal state, the city state of Berlin stands out in particular, with 13 percent of all registration processes being handled digitally.
Conversely, the usage rate for the portal is extremely low in Neumünster (0.02 percent), Leverkusen (0.05 percent) and Lübeck (0.11 percent). And: 53 municipalities do not yet offer the i-Kfz portal even one year after its nationwide launch in September 2023, including the districts of Görlitz (Saxony), Hildesheim (Lower Saxony) and Idar-Oberstein (Rhineland-Palatinate).
Wissing’s appeal: “Municipalities that are not yet connected must urgently fulfill their duty and offer this important service. They should also promote i-Kfz more, because this will relieve the burden on their own employees.”
However, it is precisely for this reason that it is questionable whether the districts are really interested in offering online registration and making it widely used: the portal is essentially a competitor to the employees at the office. And there is also a hurdle on the part of citizens: in order to use the online service, they must have activated the digital functions of their electronic ID card.