Let’s face it…I can’t imagine anyone in this country truly loves the experience that is visiting DMV whether it’s to renew a registration and do title work or even worse…the dreaded queues out the door to acquire or renew a driver’s licence.
Lord knows North Carolina’s Division of Motor Vehicles has featured rather prominently in some of the stories in this topic of “Harrowing Tales of Customer Service” and indeed in our nightmares.
Dealing with DMV has always been a matter of battling a two-headed monster.
For one thing, they actually have two separate flavours of DMV offices and it’s usually not immediately obvious which one you’re at until it’s too late.
That’s because DMV contracted out the function of doing registrations and title paperwork to private contractors a long time ago (or at least as long as I can remember!). These are not state employees and they have nothing to do with driver’s licences and other than a rather diabolical and stupid database update NC DMV executed rather poorly right after I moved back home from university, they’re generally on the ball and for the most part move the queue along expeditiously.
Even the South Hills plate agency in Cary…eventually! 😉
The other bunch in different DMV buildings are the actual driver licence examiners and these are the people who likely hate the creators and producers of the movie “Zootopia” with a passion bordering on obsession for some strange reason…
This was my experience during the last time I actually had to renew my driving licence and upgrade it to REAL ID in 2018 which could only be done in-person with no appointment system in place.
Since then, I’ve done a few more visits to the DMV licence folks with various kids in tow with varying degrees of success versus frustration (the Wendell office was wonderful, the one literally just up the street across from the Mos Eisley Wal-Mart…yeah, not so much!) and then admired the chaos during the COVID years.
As a result, DMV went to a strict appointment system for in-person renewals with an appointment system that was down most of the time and completely unfit for purpose the rest of the time. You couldn’t get an appointment time in less than three months in the future (that’s why we ended up in Wendell to get Katie’s licence and Alex’s state-issued ID and was in-and-out as walk-ins in less than a hour).
Then DMV inexplicably got even worse to where the queue times were several hours of waiting in hot weather and no hydration just to end up with an aggressively obnoxious imbecile of an examiner (Katie had this joyful experience which is why every time we pass the licence examiner’s office between Dunn and Buies Creek, it’s often greeted with a weapon’s grade glare and the Navy Pilot’s Salute).
The General Assembly finally threw their hands up in the air in July 2025 and allowed NC licences to be valid two years after expiry for driving purposes only until the end of 2027 (though that hardly helps you for flying or accessing Federal installations and is not considered a valid ID for documents needing to be notarised) because DMV not only couldn’t handle the queues, they didn’t even seem to have a clue how to solve the problems which had already led to the DMV Commissioner of the time choosing to “pursue other opportunities” a few months earlier when our current Governor took the oath of office.
DMV finally seems to have finally turned the corner on the worst of the problems plaguing the licence examiners and their operations and queue waiting times have finally dropped to averaging under one hour throughout most of the state.
That being said, I really wasn’t all that keen on even waiting that long so I finally was able to avail myself of the online renewal option which is also relatively new since I last had to renew my licence.
It’s also relatively painless if you don’t mind dealing with an overly cheerful chat-bot and getting reamed for about another $4 in fees that the vendor that created the chat-bot helps themselves to whether you like it or not.
But even as much as I *LOATHE* add-on fees for doing something in a way that actually save the government quite a bit of money, it’s hard to argue that this particular one isn’t huge value for money when it comes to just how much petrol costs these days to say nothing of how much time you’re going to be spending waiting on Flash The Dash to finally process the licence renewal.
What isn’t terribly obvious during the process is any sort of visual verification that you’re renewing a REAL ID if you’ve already gotten one nor does the temporary driving certificate it spits out at you show the gold star so there might still be some challenges until your actual licence arrives in the post.
The other thing I didn’t see any visual verification of my status as an organ donor (mind you, I probably couldn’t donate my body to science fiction but if there’s any bits of me that would be of use after I’m no longer in need of them…someone else is more than welcome to them as far as I’m concerned).
It may well have shown a sample image with the gold star and donor status but I honestly don’t remember it doing so and I didn’t capture screenshots along the way to prove it one way or another.
So in goes the renewal on 09 Mar 2026 a few weeks ahead of when it was actually required and the new licence arrived well earlier than the 20 business days they’d said it might take on 20 Mar 2026.
I’ll confess that the new design rather took me by surprise!
I wasn’t really prepared for what looked like a lizard but is actually a marbled salamander which is one of the two state amphibians (along with a Pine Barren Tree Frog) which is something that I truly did not know prior to seeing this licence design!
I had thought that someone at DMV must be playing at a joke of being a fan of my son’s Lower C beer league hockey team…the Mudpuppies (which is a different kind of salamander that you generally only find in the mountains).
The new design is chock-a-block full of NC symbology…the rolling terrain on the front and representations of the various regions on the back, the dogwood flower, the salamander, our flag and state outline and a very subtle Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.
It took me forever to find the heart representing the organ donor which is at the lower-right corner of the dogwood flower surrounded by that curling text (that’s not part of the salamander’s tail which continues on the back) but thankfully it was there and everything was correct.
But if I’m really honest, I rather miss the iconic Wright Flyer that has adorned several previous iterations of my driving licence but the new system doesn’t allow selecting the design as we once did because of all of the “security” features they’ve crammed into the licence since REAL ID came in to play (apparently this version of the licence has 50 separate features to try to foil the forgers but if memory serves, that’s what they said about the last one and well it didn’t take terribly long for the clever boffins amongst the criminals providing fake identity documents to adapt so that their illicit business could continue without hindrance).
What I didn’t miss at all was time wasted in a queue that could be spent far more productively doing anything else like converting oxygen to carbon dioxide or watching the grass grow! 🙂