I used to work in a pharmacy where someone from New Mexico left their license behind and I think it expired after 20 years or 25 years. Why do they not update your license periodically? What if you move out of state? It’s kind of silly to let a license expire after 20 years because so many things could happen in that time. Are there other states that have this policy? In California it’s every 5 years you must renew your license, which I think is reasonable.
FWIW, New Mexico licenses currently expire after usually 4 years, and it’s been like that for quite some time. You may be thinking of Arizona, which to my knowledge, issues (or at least used to) licences that expire after something like 20-25 years.
My family of Ohio residents (licenses good for 4 years) made the :eek: face when my 22-year-old sister went to Arizona and got a driver’s license that expired in 2046, on her 65th birthday.
:smack: I meant Arizona.
That is very odd. They might save money on printing and processing, but there must be big problems associated with the system as well. Most people aren’t going to be recognizable from a 15 year-old photo (considering how awful most DMV pics are to begin with).
Such a long interval will also severely hamper the introduction of new features to the license. Several states have adopted barcodes, magnetic stripes, and very recently, digital watermarks. These technologies may be obsolete long before even a fraction of the state’s residents are due to get new licenses. Having a state-of-the-art anti-forgery system is useless if crooks can just fake a decade-old card.
I’d be interested to hear what the rationale is.
PigBoy is right. Our licenses expire on our 65th birthday.
She has to use the same license for 43 years! What’s the point of even having a photo on it? Your appearance changes alot in 4 decades.
Have we considered that possibly licenses to drive are, in fact, licenses to drive, and not necessarily in existence primarily as a form of identification? For example, fishing licenses, boating licenses, hunting licenses, and marriage licenses also don’t have photos – the exist only to provide license to an activity.
Okay, given that, what do you all use in Arizona to serve as identification if your license is out of date? Do you also have to have a recent state ID card? What about out of state? If you’re blue haired and wrinkled and only have an ID from when you were 21, will the pit boss let you gamble in Las Vegas???
Maybe it’s a Dorian Grey sort of thing – if you don’t change your picture, you don’t get blue haired and wrinkled.
This is about driving licenses? Funny, but here in Germany (where we are subject to the cliché that we love bureaucracy and paperwork) driving licenses don’t expire at all - they’re issued for life. Since the European Union unified the vehicle catgeories and the design of the licenses in 1998, I suppose this is true for the entire Union, but I’m not sure about this, as for example regulation of driving tests is still a national issue.
My father, who turned 60 this year, still has a very old and very dirty piece of paper with a photograph of him as a student. Always funny to look at.
Maybe I should add that we rarely use driving licenses for identification purposes. This is accomplished with the mandatory ID cards, which expire after 5 years.
Same thing in Greece. My DL was issued in 1999 (when I was 18) and expires in 2045. But I believe for trucks and other big vehicles licences expire every 15 years.
My British license was issued when I was 17 and expires at 70. It does not have a picture on it.