Apple Wallet is already home to your credit cards and boarding passes, and soon it could hold your driver’s license, too.
The United Kingdom’s Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) has revealed that it is prototyping digital licenses that live on your iPhone.
“Here’s a little prototype of something we’re working on,” teased Oliver Morley, CEO of the DVLA, when he tweeted the photo above, which shows a mock U.K. driving license inside the Apple Wallet app.
Until last June, Drivers in the U.K. had to carry two different kinds of licenses: a “photo card,” like those used in the U.S., which includes a photo and personal details, and a “counterpart,” which detailed any points the driver had collected for speeding.
Now that the DVLA has scrapped that counterpart, drivers only need the photo card — and so there’s nothing to prevent it from going digital. But you probably shouldn’t get too excited about ditching your card just yet.
Morley explains this is just a prototype for now, which means there’s no timeline — or even a guarantee U.K. licenses will come to Apple Wallet. And if they do, they won’t replace the photo card completely; they’ll be an “add-on,” Morley says.
The obvious idea behind this is to allow drivers to leave their physical license at home. If you don’t need to carry it with you all the time, the risk of losing it or having it stolen is greatly reduced. And if it’s harder to steal driver’s licenses, it’s even harder to forge them.
The reason why the DVLA won’t scrap the physical card is because you’ll presumably still need that to prove your identity for anything more than just a random roadside stop.
We’ve contacted Morley for more information and we’ll update this post if we get any, but it seems the DVLA doesn’t have too much to share just yet.
