Americans can soon make cryptocurrency transactions from their cars and quickly reach their destination. A subsidiary of Ford Motors Dearborn received a patent for a technology based on cryptocurrencies and blockchain. The system is called Cooperatively Managed Merge and Pass (CMMP). The patent application was filed in 2016 and was recently approved for Ford Global Technologies
CMMP is a token-based system that works in your own environment and helps you drive a car on the road. This is a platform for connecting machines among themselves in which, with the help of GPS technology, drivers can inform each other about the traffic intensity on the roads. The system will also monitor and collect data about the drivers.
"The CMMP system works with individual transactions based on tokens, where commercial vehicles and consumer vehicles agree to carry out transactions in the crypto currency", the patent says.
This gives the consumer vehicle "privileged access to the road" during periods of heavy congestion, avoiding traffic jams and getting to the destination faster, paying a certain price for it. The patent explains: "commercial vehicles voluntarily occupy slower lanes so that a customer's vehicle can take a more advantageous position on the road."
The services of commercial vehicles are paid in CCMP tokens. The price depends on the time savings that the client vehicle requests in a particular situation. The patent application explains:
In practice, “This system would temporarily allow for particular cooperative vehicles (sometimes referred to as “consumer vehicles”) to drive at higher speeds in less-occupied lanes of traffic and also to merge and pass freely when needed. Other participating cooperative vehicles (sometimes referred to as “merchant vehicles”) voluntarily occupy slower lanes of traffic to facilitated the consumer vehicle to merge into their lanes and pass as needed […] The CMMP tokens are used to validate and authorize a transaction in which, at consumer vehicle request, the merchant vehicles either occupy slower lanes of traffic themselves, or allow the consumer vehicle to merge into their own lane and pass as necessary. The participating merchant vehicles gain CMMP tokens from the consumer vehicle.”
The patent document states that “In some examples, the time allotted to the request of the consumer vehicle is based on the number of CMMP tokens chosen by the consumer vehicle to be spent at that particular time. For example, a driver of a consumer vehicle which is running late for an appointment may request to pass any participating merchant vehicles for a duration of 10 minutes on a particular road or highway for 60 CMMP tokens, at a rate of 10 seconds preferential access per token.”
The application does not specify whether other cryptocurrencies will be supported.
A similar project could well be the subject of an ICO for some startup. However, Ford seems to have left the startups. Ford is going to invest $ 11 billion in electric cars by 2022 and has invested heavily in mobile technology, and over the next 5 years will invest more than a billion dollars in artificial intelligence.