Future Ford cars could spy on other vehicles.
Cars are integrating all kinds of new technologies all the time.
Ford has made a commitment to build fully autonomous cars for the purpose of ride sharing in 2021.
However, a new patent filing shed some light on some other technology Ford is working on.
the patent title is method and apparatus for crowdsourced vehicle identification.
Here's how the system would work.
The system will be able to obtain an image of a vehicle plate.
Then it will identify the characters on that plate.
Here's where people start thinking twice about the tag.
The license plate would be checked against a database of sought vehicle plates.
If there's a match of a sought vehicle and that license plate.
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The system would report it.
The patent says the system would even be able to check partial images of plates.
So in theory, if this tech was in many vehicles.
Those cars could act in concert to consistently check license plates all the time.
Ford also outlined a potential business model for this tech.
Here's what the patent says.
For example, in one model, use of the vehicle tracking may be free if a user participates in finding other vehicles, but may cost some nominal amount if the user wants the service-side only, without participating in locating other vehicles.
That could mean that if this tech does reach a four vehicle, the company could incentivize people into allowing their cars to participate in the tracking network.
Now this is just a patent, not some grand announcement that Ford will track all the cars ever.
So stay calm for now.
If you want more information, check out CNET.com.
I'm Iyaz Akhtar and I'll see you online.
