Are you running a company that uses rental trucks as a part of its operations? If you do, have you developed a proper strategy to make sure your company only uses trucks with apportioned plates? If the plates indeed are apportioned, you can rest assured that the truck rental company you are working with actually knows what it is doing.
If you are using trucks from a rental company that does not have apportioned plates or if you are not aware of what the terms “apportioned Plate”, “apportioned registration” or “International Registration Plan” even mean, you really need to read this and educate yourself. Otherwise, you can end up in serious trouble when it comes to costs.
What Exactly Are Apportioned Plates?
The three terms “apportioned plates”, “apportioned registration” and “International Registration Plan” are closely linked to each other. They concern the registration of commercial vehicles operating within the jurisdiction of two or more states. Basically, what you need to understand is that when a vehicle has apportioned registration, each of the states the vehicle travels in receives a certain portion of the registration fees, depending on how many miles it has traveled in the state in question.
Apportioned plates essentially get issued to the commercial vehicles with apportioned registration and they are attached to those vehicles. The apportioned registration for a commercial vehicle is its official registration in the state that the fleet of the vehicle is based.
The IRP is a vehicle registration agreement and a federally-backed program between the United States and particular provinces in Canada.
What is the Use of Apportioned Plates?
Having commercial vehicles with apportioned plates allows the vehicles to travel between states without having to worry about registering in each state that it travels to. This is a major source of convenience, especially for companies that have vehicles operating throughout the country.
Having apportioned plates on the commercial vehicles your company uses will help you avoid massive fines, which you might have to pay for not having the right registration in the states your vehicles are conducting business in.
The apportioned registration provides fee reduction options to the company that has registered the vehicle operating fleets with more than one commercial vehicle that travels through different states in the country.
Many might be wondering if they will have to make the individual payment of the different registration fees for all the states the vehicles travel in to them, based on the percentage the vehicle traveled in the state. Luckily, you will not have to bother going through so much effort to distribute the registration fees across the states your vehicles operate in.
The base jurisdiction of the commercial vehicle where its company is based will be the one responsible for collecting the total annual fees. The jurisdiction will keep the appropriate amount that has to be allocated to itself while disbursing the rest of the payments across the different states that the company’s commercial vehicle has traveled in.
There is absolutely no need for multiple registration cards, license plates and stickers. A single one of each is allocated to the commercial vehicles with apportioned plates. It is as simple as that.
What Happens if Your Vehicle Does Not have Apportioned Plates?
If your fleet has vehicles that do not utilize apportioned plates but they are conducting business in a state they are not registered in, this can result in hefty fines. While it is possible to register the vehicle in the different states, it is a long process to make fleet operations feasible for a company. You can expect the fines for operating commercial vehicles in states that they are not registered in to be high. Depending on the state, the resulting fines for inappropriately registered vehicles can be around a $1,000 or higher.
While the fine might not amount to a lot for some companies, you need to consider the fact that this applies to each of the vehicles operating in your fleet. If you have a sizable fleet for your company, all of them operate interstate and none of them have apportioned plates, this can become quite an amount for your company to bear.
Why Rent Trucks with Summit Fleet
At Summit Fleet, we make a point to have all our vehicles get proper registration for all the different jurisdictions they will operate in across North America. Having been in the industry for a long time now, we have seen some exorbitant fines being charged to companies which have commercial fleets operating interstate. It is not a position that you want your company in.
When you rent your trucks for the commercial fleet operations of your company, you can rest assured that you will not be liable to pay any of the hefty fines for not having appropriately registered vehicles operating in different states. We only use apportioned plates for the trucks that we provide to our customers so that they will never have to face the issues of registrations and fines while operating them.
There are other benefits that your company stands to gain by utilizing vehicles from our fleet. We can assure you of complete tax compliance as well as a comprehensive GPS tracking program that offers you additional security, and a single point of contact. We believe in making things as convenient as possible for our customers in every regard.
Perhaps the biggest convenience you can avail by renting the commercial trucks through Summit Fleet (other than apportioned plates, of course) is that we offer nationwide delivery of our trucks. Come rain or shine, wherever your company is based and wherever you need us to deliver a commercial truck of your choice from our fleet, we will bring it to you.
