Sick of Car Jams? Let Crypto Car Payments Ease Your Route

Sick of Car Jams? Let Crypto Car Payments Ease Your Route

Well, the traffic on our roads just seems to increase every day. Don’t you just wish that you had a magic payment system that would open up the traffic for you?

For you, you have an important meeting to attend, but others around you are just out to do their shopping. Well, Ford may have come to your rescue with a recently published patent for a cryptocurrency method which allows cars to intercommunicate and accept payments for cars to have priority [here]:

With the Cooperatively Managed Merge and Pass (CMMP) system, cars in a given area could all accept payments and then decide how to move aside to allow a given car through. In this way priority could be given to certain drivers who have time constraints.

The patent talks about co-operative vehicles (the consumer vehicles) which will be able to drive a higher speeds in less-occupied traffic lanes, and which can pass freely when required. Other vehicles — known as merchant vehicles — will then allow the consumer vehicles to pass freely and will occupy the slower lanes, and then move aside for the consumer vehicles.

The payment involves cars intercommunicating with CMMP tokens and when they are paid the merchant vehicles occupy the slower lanes, or will move aside for the merchant vehicles. In this way the system would allows a group flow rate through areas of congestion and integrate into a co-operative adaptive cruise control (CACC) infrastructure.

There are many unknowns about the patent, such as who is actually going to run the blockchain. Several car manufacturers, too, have been looking at cryptocurrency payments, such as Mercedes-Benz who have introduced cryptocurrency payments for environmentally-friendly driving (and which could be cashed-in for VIP events).

Conclusion

The patenting system favours the rich — those with lots of R&D money to spend — and a patent such as this is worrying as it isn’t really a scientific advance or a technical breakthrough. For me, it’s “Let’s stick a crypto payment system onto a problem”. Unfortunately, many small companies can struggle to get investment because of patent blockers, and with the fear of a large company coming after them with a “catch-all” patent. For me the whole car-to-car communication thing needs to be properly looked at before we could even consider a payment system.

Overall car manufacturers make cars … but can they make the secure from Cyber attacks? … read here.