Page 69 - April 2023
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Would you Buy a Self-Driving Car t hat Takes It self
Back t o t he Dealership If a Payment is Missed?
Ford Motor Company is betting that you might, reflected in its
having been granted a patent on the technology to make such
a thing happen. The patent application, titled ?Systems and
Mo t o r s po r t
Methods to Repossess a Vehicle?, was filed in 2021 but only
News f r o m recently published by the United States Patent and Trademark
Her e a n d Office (USPTO). Car owners already give some car companies
a c r o s s t h e the ability to remotely locate missing cars, to warm them up
and start them on cold mornings, and to employ emergency
Po n d braking and adaptive cruise control. This is called driver
assistance technology. Could driver payment compliance
technology be far behind?
Ford describes the technology as a ?multi-step repossession
procedure?designed to deal with uncooperative owners and
avoid confrontation.
First Ast on Mart in DBS 770 Ult imat e Sold at Ford does want to stress that a delinquent owner would
receive messages through the vehicle's infotainment system
Charit y Auct ion in Swit zerland
that would advise that a payment on a car loan or a lease
payment was overdue.
Aston Martin hasn? said how much this car will
t
actually cost or how many will make it to the U.S.. Next would come a series of "loss of function" warnings such
as loss of air conditioning, navigation features, or sound
The DB11 is projected to take over as Aston
system speakers could be turned off in turn as a way to
Martin's flagship grand touring car and will receive encourage payment.
a major update in the process.
Next an owner might discover that increasing recalcitrance on
paying would result on the car stopping a various locations or
locking the owner out of the car at certain times. In case of an
emergency like the need to drive to a hospital or for essential
travel like driving to work to make the money to pay Ford,
access could be granted to the owner.
When all else has failed, however, and the owner is still in
arrears, the car could be instructed to drive itself to the
showroom. Cars at the end of their safe life span might also be
instructed to take themselves off the motorway and to drive to
a recycling facility or a breaker's yard.
While the thought of coming out in the morning to find that
your car has removed itself until you pay up, Ford is quick to
add that while having applied for a patent for this new
Above: The DBS 770 Ultimate will be limited to a
technology, there are no plans at present to roll the feature out
production run of 449 cars, to include coupes and
in any of its product lines.
convertibles. While the company has yet to build
any customer cars the production run is already sold Further putting the brakes on, fully autonomous vehicles are
not , at present, legally allowed on UK roads. However, the UK
out, now including car #1. Aston Martin has not yet
government is supportive of the ongoing development of
indicated the final cost of the cars, nor how many will
driverless cars. Government-backed trials of autonomous cars
be arriving in America once they begin to ship in the
have taken place in Bristol, Coventry, Greenwich and Milton
second quarter of 2023, according to a company Keynes.
release.
If this should come to pass, the old promissory dodge. " The
Image and information courtesy of Aston Martin check is in the mail." will take on new urgency.
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