All owners of cars and motorcycles in Kenya, including nonresidents, have 12 months to convert their license plates to the new digital plates arranged by the Ministry of Interior. By the end of 2023, therefore, the old license plates of cars registered in Kenya will no longer be valid and the vehicles will no longer be able to circulate.
Motorists will be able to purchase new license plates at a cost of 3,000 shillings per vehicle.
The problem as far as many foreigners who own cars are concerned is to be in good standing with the vehicle registrations, as they are often not changed at the time of purchase by making the transfer from the old to the new owner, or the original document does not exist. So better to move ahead to get everything sorted out (the transfer can also be done online) and then go accordingly to the appropriate offices in Kilifi or Mombasa (there is no longer a civil DMV in Malindi).

The current system, as the national media detailed last September, is prone to abuse by criminals and unscrupulous car dealers who use a single registration document for several cars and divert vehicles in transit to neighboring countries to the local market without paying the duty.
"The court ruling only prevents us from awarding a tender to a company to produce the license plates on our behalf, as was in the plans all along, but it does not prevent us from doing it ourselves," said a senior security official on condition of anonymity so that he could freely discuss the issue, which is still pending in court.

This system will not only control the dual registration of vehicles, but also make it easy for security agencies to obtain, on the spot, all the necessary details about any vehicle through a link to a central government database maintained by the National Intelligence Service.

By simply scanning a license plate with a handheld digital device, law enforcement agencies, insurance companies, and the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) will instantly obtain the vehicle owner's name, registration number, engine and chassis numbers, and history of previous owners.

The new state plan saves taxpayers billions of shillings that the government would have paid to contractors, who would have added their profit to the living cost of license plates.
The decision matured after a very long parliamentary process, prolonged in part by opposition from companies that have been going to the Kenyan High Court since 2013 to avoid losing previous contracts to print the vehicle identification plates used until now.
In the end, the government, which has always considered the new digital license plates an important tool for identifying vehicle owners and the impossibility of cloning them or producing plates for non-legal uses, won the battle and was able to activate the process whereby the institutions themselves will produce and distribute the new plates.

The new license plates will have anti-counterfeiting features that include holograms, watermarks and laser markers. They will be part of a broader security system that includes next-generation driver's licenses and an integrated transportation management system (TIMS) used to manage the acquisition and transfer of vehicles.

The Kenya Bureau of Statistics KNBS estimates that just under 5 million vehicles are currently on the road in Kenya and 126,000 were imported in 2021 alone, a steady annual increase of about 14 percent from 2015 to the present.