Dead E-ZPass Battery? Here's What You Need To Do

For drivers in certain regions of the U.S., E-ZPass fundamentally changed how they navigate some roads, making it easier to zip through toll booths and avoid bottlenecks, saving time and fuel. Though it's simple to set your GPS to avoid toll roads, sometimes it's just not in your best interest, and E-ZPass can often save you a few cents or dollars off that pesky toll itself. Formed in 1990 as the E-ZPass Interagency Group, E-ZPass now includes 20 states in the Northeast, Southeast, and Midwestern parts of the U.S., from Maine to Florida and as far west as Minnesota.

It's a simple process – you open an E-ZPass account and receive a small electronic transponder that you mount to the inside of your windshield. When you travel a toll road, receivers read the transponder and charges your account accordingly. Different states offer different ways for customers to replenish their accounts, with many using an automatic feature that debits their payment whenever their E-ZPass account balance hits a certain point. It's a far cry from the old toll booths of the past, and some states are even doing away with toll plazas altogether! But what should you do if your transponder battery dies, and how will you even know if it does?

With more than 35 million accounts and 59 million tags, you better believe E-ZPass has a way to handle dead batteries — simply replace the transponder.

If you're an E-ZPass customer and your transponder doesn't appear to work when you pass through a toll plaza, don't panic! In many cases, the system will default to the toll-by-plate process that is used for non-E-ZPass drivers, so your account will simply be debited using that system, or you'll receive an invoice in the mail. Still, this could prove problematic if your E-ZPass transponder is supposed to open a gate that is blocking entrance to the tolled road, which is what happened to a senior producer at local NBC affiliate WAVY 10 in Hampton Roads, Virginia. He was blocked from access to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, eventually realizing that his transponder battery was dead.

Just like anything else with a battery, your E-ZPass transponder can die, and there's no easy way to replace the battery. Luckily, they're built to last, with a life of about 13 to 14 years, though it won't last quite as long if you're a frequent toll road traveler. If you have an E-ZPass Flex, it has a slightly shorter shelf life of around 9 to 12 years. If you need to request a new E-ZPass, you should call the issuing agency, which will hopefully issue you a new transponder free of charge. You can try to log in to your account and request a new transponder, but at the time of writing, there is no option to mark a transponder as malfunctioning, only as lost/stolen, and you will have to pay a $10 fee for a new transponder.