If you have not heard yet, Ford has got a new patent that allows cars on the road communicate with each other that can reduce traffic. You can check out the patent for yourself!

“Vehicle-to-vehicle cooperation to marshal traffic” – was published Tuesday and awarded to Ford Global Technologies, LLC. What is the focus? To get rid of traffic congestion and coordinate speeds between cars.

They plan to use a CMMP system “Cooperatively Managed Merge and Pass (CMMP) system. The purpose will be to monitor, record and then evaluate driving behavior of the driver.

They state:

“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 [allow] the consumer vehicle to merge into their lanes and pass as needed.”

The plan is to use CMMP tokens to message between the vehicles.

“The CMMP system operates with individual token-based transactions, where the merchant vehicles and the consumers’ vehicles agree to trade units of cryptocurrency (sometimes referred to as ‘CMMP tokens’). The CMMP tokens are used to validate and authorize a transaction in which, at consumer vehicles’ 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.”

“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,” the patent document states. “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.”

Ford has yet to reveal anything on their experience with the blockchain however they were looking to higher an in-house engineer to develop some things around the subject.

Wondering what are your thoughts on this? What other ways do you think automakers should be implementing blockchain technology into their products?

Thanks for reading!

Originally posted on https://www.abovecrypto.com