The electric and digital transformation of the automotive industry comes with many promises for a better tomorrow. Electric vehicles could drastically reduce carbon emissions in the transport sector; connected cars will give us access to services and features we don’t currently enjoy; over-the-air software updates could eliminate high repair costs; and automated vehicles can make driving significantly safer.
But it’s worth remembering that, at the end of the day, car companies are just looking to make money, not make the world a better place.
This week, it was revealed that Ford applied for a patent in a system that would use connected car technology to better assist in vehicle recovery. The news of the publication of the patent was the first reported by unit this week (which, for the sake of full disclosure, is a post I previously served as managing editor on), and outlines a variety of procedures related to returning cars when payments are delinquent.
Ford applied for a patent on a system that would use connected car technology to better assist in vehicle recovery.
These include sending messages to the owner’s smartphone or the vehicle itself, total blocking of drivers, disabling features such as air conditioning, geo-fencing drivers to only operate within a certain set time or area so that can still go to work, and in one particularly heartbreaking example. , allowing a self-driving car to drive itself to an impound lot, or to a junkyard if the market value of the car is determined to be below a certain threshold.
Someone at Ford put a lot of thought into all of this.
The patent document describes dozens of ways to remotely and electronically revolutionize the entire recovery process, including direct liaison with lending institutions and the police.
Today, that process is much more low-tech, but it’s still infamously predatory and unsupervised. In states like California and NYrepossession can happen if a homeowner falls behind on payments by even a few weeks, and creditors aren’t even required to notify drivers before it happens.
A homeowner’s rights in this situation depend on the state you live in and what is in your loan agreement.
Whether car owners can even reinstate their loans by updating the balance depends on what’s in their loan agreement, and their right to do so varies from state to state. If they can’t get your car back, it could sell quickly at auction.
The patent document describes dozens of ways to remotely and electronically revolutionize the entire recovery process, including direct liaison with lending institutions and the police.
In recent years, there have been an increase in the use of electronic transponders in cars financed through subprime loans. Those devices put low-income or bad credit buyers at risk of having their vehicles remotely disabled if they fall behind on payments.
Ford’s patent, however, takes this idea to the level of the brain of a galaxy, concocting multiple scenarios where connected vehicle data and autonomy can be used to immediately repossess vehicles if owners slip up.
The knee-jerk reaction to all of this is “Make your car payments on time.” And that’s certainly true, but it doesn’t take deep soul searching to realize that people fall behind on payments and other bills all the time and for all sorts of reasons. These include sudden job loss, unexpected medical costs, personal emergencies, or the loss of a partner or family member who was contributing to the payments. Nobody wants to get his car back, after all.
Ford self-recovering automobile patent by ahawkins8223 on scribd
But this Ford patent represents something of a nightmare scenario for the future of the connected car, one in which the car, long a symbol of personal freedom and it is still advertised as such — comes with much more software-driven external control over where we go, what we do, and how we do it. Just as car manufacturers want you to subscribe to features you once received in advance, like heated seats, or look for restrictions on if you have the right to repair your vehicle or notUndoubtedly, the new era of automobiles will come with many more conditions.
The repossession patent is especially mortifying when you consider the state of the auto market in recent years.
Cars are more expensive than ever, and people are having a harder time paying for them than ever before, a trend that was happening even before the pandemic sparked a market supply chain crisis. At the end of last year, the average new car in America cost a record $49,507, according to Kelley’s Blue Book. This new crop of electric vehicles, which would certainly be the first to feature such technologies, is even more expensive, around $61,448 per vehicle.
It doesn’t take deep soul searching to realize that people fall behind on payments and other bills all the time and for all sorts of reasons.
Automakers have spent years pushing buyers toward pricier trucks, SUVs, and crossovers and removing smaller cars from their lineups to take advantage of the higher profit margins of those vehicles. the result has been longer loan terms, an increase in negative principal “carried over” from past auto loans, and more total auto debt than ever before. Just this week, Fortune reported The United States is now experiencing its highest rate of “serious default” since 2006, as high interest rates and skyrocketing prices squeezed people’s budgets. Used car prices are even more out of control.
Finally, auto companies may have taken the worst lessons from the pandemic’s car shortage. The result has been cases like General Motors on hiatus in the production of its most popular trucks to “maintain optimal inventory levels”, what leads to fears that supply could be kept artificially low to keep prices sky-high.
In other words, automakers and their dealers have spent years raising car prices or taking advantage of market conditions. Now they are coming up with high-tech ways to hit back at homeowners if they can’t pay.
Naturally, this isn’t the kind of tech-related headline Ford wants. The automaker objected in a statement published in various outlets, saying it has no plans to implement this system. “We file patents on new inventions as a normal course of business, but they are not necessarily an indication of new business or product plans,” Ford said in a statement.
Even if you take Ford at face value there, this kind of thing can absolutely be done. In a world where automakers are actively fighting your ability to fix your own car, there’s no reason to believe they have consumers’ best interests in mind all the time. And while connected car technology is still in its relative infancy, it’s only a matter of time before those cars enter the used market or the technology spreads to cheaper vehicles.
So as we look at how automotive technology advances in the coming years, it’s worth asking drivers everywhere: Who is this all for? And will this next generation of cars save the planet and its people, or just save the auto industry?
