The City of Cape Town has announced that LEU machines at Driving License Testing Centres will be offline, until further notice.
According to the City, the machines used for eye tests and fingerprint capturing will be offline, which means that driving license card renewals will not be processed at the moment.
However, learner license classes, driving license tests and card collections are still operational.
The City went on to say that this is a countrywide outage and it will await feedback from the National Department of Transport on timelines for reinstatement of the service.
The announcement also comes days after Transport Minister, Fikile Mbalula, extended the learner’s licences, driving licence cards, temporary driving licences, and driving permits period.
According to Mbalula, following consultation with several MECs and the South African Local Government Association, the department has decided to extend the grace period of the validity of driving licences, which expired between 26 March 2020 and 31 August 2021, to 15 April 2022.
Mbalula said that the number of driving licence cards, for which renewal applications are still to be made stands at 1 424 756 – a reduction from 2 813 016.
“This means that only 49% of the affected motorists have applied for renewal of their expired driving licences… Motorists are not coming forward to renew their licences for a variety of reasons.
“As of 28 March 2022, we had produced 628 150 driving licence cards, reducing the backlog of cards to be printed to 522 839. This is in respect of those who have already applied to renew their licences, ” Mbalula noted.
Meanwhile, in the Western Cape, out of 403 507 expired licences, 218 286 driving licences have already been renewed, representing 54.1% of the renewals.
Also read:
Picture: SA 411