The Expert Podcast

Love the idea or hate it, the days of paper car titles are coming to an end. If you've struggled to get yourself a paper title because of missing documents or having to deal with government bureaucracy, having to deal with all kinds of forms, and having to sign paper with ink instead of the way you do everything else in life with electronic signatures, your wishes are coming true.

The eArt Coalition is a group of like-minded private sector companies that are coming together to try to modernize vehicle titles. What does this mean? Well, government agencies that issue titles are at the state level—the Department of Motor Vehicles, the Department of Transportation, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles—every state has one, and they have very bureaucratic rules. As you know, you've probably seen the DMV featured on sitcoms as a punch line. They make it a joke about how hard it is to deal with the DMV, and it's because they're one of the only agencies that is still in the dinosaur age with paper and pen rather than electronics.

So we're coming together as a group to try to make vehicle titles more popular in the modern era. You can see our car titles here. Look at some of the other members: DocuSign, we're one of the founding members along with NADA (National Automotive Dealers Association), meum auctions, and many other high-profile automotive stakeholders to work on getting vehicle titles into the modern age.

The objectives are to get electronic signatures on title documents just like DocuSign, electronic title and registration processing so you don't have to wait in line at DMV, you can do it all online, and the transfers and title transfers. This is going to revolutionize vehicle titles. Now it may take a couple of years; it's not going to happen overnight, but finally, the struggles that we've dealt with with clients for almost 20 years now dealing with titles are starting to have some light at the end of the tunnel. We're an advocate, and we're rooting for you as a consumer to not have to deal with these problems anymore.

We're taking the lead with these other companies to revolutionize vehicle titles, and to try to support that, we're putting a lot of money into programming and technology that will make title processing easier as a company. So once all the government agencies are on board, we can just plug in our IT department, and the titles can be done right off the bat, sometimes instantly. You don't have to wait anymore.

Keep an eye on this channel and our website, and we'll see how fast we can get government agencies to adopt this more modern and proper process of doing titles. And it's not really their fault they're stuck in the dinosaur age because many of their computers are old-school Cobalt or forant computers that aren't able to interface with more modern technology.

Let us know in the comments if this is a good idea and if it's long overdue.