The more the tech ecosystem advances, the more ideas come to the realm of possibilities. I have not seen yet the following concept being expressed anywhere, so here is a draft description of it.
With all the electric cars coming up, and all the communication improvements being made, it’s easy to imagine a future where cars are more like “knight rider” (or K2000 in french) – smart, preventive, with automation features, autopilot and communicative intelligence (AI). Tesla is on a good path, and many other ones are not far behind. Even better would be the capability of doing cross cars communications, as if cars were people. Just people on the road. Let me explain further.
Framing the use case
We, humans, are encapsulated in a car for most of its use, enclosed within the metal frame. Because it is the case for every car’s owner, let’s consider the car and the rider as one entity. There should be no debate that communication between entities, in general, opens the door to much more intelligent processes and applications, usage and so on. Communication is what differentiates humans from animals. To date, our cars are animal-like entities when it comes to interactions with one another.
Distributed ledgers & Digital identity of everything
With the latest developments of finTech, and distributed ledgers particularly, we see new capabilities emerging around digital identity. The first use cases of digital identity are simple ones, such as digital public key holders, voters, KYC by address, social identity by DLT wallet, and so on. In the not so distant future, I am confident the digital identity of cars will come by. This will be a key to open the new communication capability of cars in question here. I would love to go into more details on the digital identity of cars, but for the sake of a high-level picture, let’s assume for now that all cars now have a digital key, meaning the car next to yours is recognized by the system, and displays on your dashboard.
The possible outcome
Ideally, each identified car is clearly described in the system, not only via its public key, but also with simple car properties such as its brand, model, and color. From there you could start a vocal/text conversation with the car’s rider of your choice, for example, or even trigger automatic expressions that you’d have pre-defined on common events such as an unfair move or dangerous action. This is one social use case, but more importantly, it could be used for preventive and rescue events. The topic of all the applications possible are eventually infinite, the point being, now we deal with human-like cars, advancing the world forward again, the cars being an important part of our daily life. It is also possible that by this time, cars don’t look like cars that we know today.
In short, the vision described here is the possibility of car entities (cars and their riders) communicating with one another at will, under a perimeter probably limited by the human eye visibility otherwise there is no point that I can think of yet. That along with the more shortcoming vision of micropayments being enabled in cars for all sort of services (see IOT projects related to IOTA, Bosh, and Volkswagen) and the driving autopilot features will certainly change the way we commute and optimize our time while moving from A to B.
Open questions
Many more details would need to be narrowed down further to make this a possible use case, including for example the technical feasibility of quickly identifying all the cars around, frontward and backyard, and for which perimeter. Will there be a better connection than Bluetooth, will there be better AI combined with cameras and captors, etc..
Disclaimers
This is no financial advice nor an endorsement to any specific project. If interested to discuss further, feel free to reach out.