Ford trying to patent system that reports speeding vehicles to police
Ford says its system could make law enforcement's job easier.
"Ain't no snitches riding with us
Ol mo the mouth n***as could holler the front" - Lil' Wayne
Ooh yes good patent it so other manufacturers won't do it. It's a win-win since I already wouldn't want a ford
Edit: what it uses cameras to look at other vehicles??? That is much worse
Yep, it snitches on other cars!
Let's be real, close to a majority of Americans have no issue with their iPhone being used as part of a mesh tracking network, even if it helps abusers with airtags.
All they have to do is sell this to people as benefiting them, and they will gobble it up. Hell, chances are, insurance companies will start offering reduced rates if you drive one (and then they buy the data from Ford and increase rates with it).
Ooh yes good patent it so other manufacturers won't do it.
Patents don't necessarily stop other OEMs from using it. It just means they'll have to pay Ford a fee to license it, themselves.
Sooo how long before we find a way to jailbreak the thing and essentially have an on-board "give that car a ticket" button to report false speed data on any driver we happen to be pissed off at?
...yeah I'd 100% abuse the fuck out of that.
Are they trying to sell fewer vehicles?
"But if we market it as a subscription service, then surely customers will want it" - Some clueless executive
Pay to lose
it'll be something the cops subscribe to, and car owners will have no say.
Ford could put all their R&D money into developing low-cost EVs, but they'd prefer to give the cops a handout.
Maybe a natural consequence but better than that would be low profile vehicles
Ford could put all their R&D money into developing low-cost EVs,
Thus making the EVs very expensive.... just sayin'
Edit: I don't know why you are downvoting. These are economic realities as they exist today. More R&D => greater costs => higher price. Fully Automated Luxury Communism is, unfortunately, not a likely reality in our lifetimes.
While I wish people would stop fucking speeding (you really aren't getting there that much faster) and tailgaiting like fucking Talladega nights, I still think this is bullshit and fuck Ford for doing this.
The need:
Don't drive over people, kids, pets or other items such as personal property or buildings.
The current status:
People don't do those things because mostly they are good enough not to run you over. Bad people on the other hand have no internal limits to prevent tragedy.
The fix:
You can't go faster than the speed limit. Bad people can still drive you over or hit your car or house.
You see how this works? The problem wasn't even addressed. But additionally there's the problem of "I'm at point A and would like to get to point B but not faster than the speed limit so the cop doesn't shoot me 19 times in the back of the head."
The fix: you can't go faster than the speed limit. This allows you to get to point B. However the cop can still shoot you 19 times in the back of the head even when you didn't do anything wrong.
Are they trying to make cars undesirable?
It's an absolute win win.
As I said. Win win. This is fantastic news.
Just theirs.
But you know, not a bad thought.
Heh. Guess theyre tired of making money
Right? Why the hell would I buy a vehicle that's going to report me to the police?
They’re probably waiting for this tech to be required by law and make a lot of cash on the patent.
Because it will not report you. It will report others it sees on the road - except Fords.
Ah classic boot licking just like ol' henry ford
What do you mean by tha-
Only a single great man, Ford, to their fury still maintains full independence [from the control of Jewish masters]. -(Mein Kampf)
Oh. Well, shit.
Fascist nazi fuck company. Class traitor ICE vehicles seem on point though.
That face when you allow your factories in Europe to become war machines, but not the ones in your own home.
Allegiances and all that.
This is likely for new models of Interceptors so that cops don't have to hold those heavy radar guns to generate revenue. Instead they can automatically ticket speeders while driving to the donut shop or their next victim's house.
Cops hate this one simple trick!
No, they love it because they have to do less to cause more misery.
I'm never buying a newer car.
enshittification might just be how capitalism destroys itself.
The thing with new cars is that they turn into old cars.
True, I'll never a own a car with technology that can send my data to anyone else.
You won't buy a Ford because it'll rat you out to the cops
I won't buy a Ford because they're dog shit vehicles
We are not the same
With how rarely Toyota's break down, I hesitate to consider any other car company. Ford is near bottom of the barrel.
Yup! Wanna change your battery?
"FUCK YOU, GO TO AND PAY A DEALER CAUSE WE BURIED THAT SHIT INSIDE THE FUCKING ENGINE COMPARTMENT!" -Ford
I can't believe no one has sued them for this anti-consumer bullshit. I don't know anything about cars, but even I have been able to change the battery in every vehicle I have ever owned.
I rented a Ford focus once and it really was a dog shit vehicle. Every other vehicle could easily interface with my iPod but this piece of shit would need to scan the iPod for 5-10 minutes (making the head unit completely unusable in the meantime) at which point it would start playing some random song from the iPod that it bizarrely determined was first. That was the most obvious shitty design flaw, but literally every thing about the car was piss poor. If I hadn't been against Ford already because they knowingly killed people with those defective Firestones, I would've completely turned against them from that one rental experience. Fuck Ford.
The all new Ford Narc 2024, with optional stitches.
Maybe they are patenting this just so that no one else can make it! Because they are generous kind hearted people, right? Right?..... Omg :(
If they program in an exception to not report other Fords it could become a competitive advantage.
Nope it just takes one jurisdiction to mandate a reporting system is used and then they have a captive market.
And that's why I love old cars.
Great, investors have a target to short sell in the car industry based on Fords bad product development
This idea seems like what someone would come up with if they’re devoid from the reality of driving and have only been chauffeured around lol
Yeah, nobody would willingly buy this. I certainly wouldn't. Never mind the obvious perpetual privacy violation baked right in to a hairbrained scheme like this, but could you ever fully trust it to work correctly and not ever randomly (or not-so-randomly) send people up for prosecution under false pretenses? I guarantee you the speed tattle system will be a black box, some dipshit legislator would pass a law making fucking with it or reverse engineering it a crime "because safety," and then any time the state wants to harass anyone they can just ping somebody's Ford to spit out a false speeding ticket (maybe even one that's egregious enough to count as a felony like 130 in a 25, or whatever). And how are you going to be equipped to argue against it? It's going to be your word against the computer and Ford's army of lawyers and experts plus the police, in a system that's already heavily stacked against the defendant.
This will probably only see any actual use being built into police cars and maybe commercial fleets, but not civilian vehicles.
If I have to buy a "new" car someday, I'm cutting off every antenna I see.
Unfortunately just like your cell phone we don't really need external antennas anymore. In a lot of cases there's not even a wire inside you can easily cut, just traces deep on the board
What I've been reading about on that subject is that cars often have a Telematics Control Unit or TCU that can actually be disabled if you can find it. It's a box that plugs in to the wiring harness. They also have antennas that could be connected by a wire that you could locate, giving us another option to disable them by just disconnecting the antenna wire. That way the TCU could still talk to the main computers but not be able to send out its data.
They could make a system that doesn't allow the vehicle to speed but I guess allowing it and then snitching is better
That sounds like a really bad idea. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to go over the limit situationally.
Especially when other drivers could potentially put you in harms way that you otherwise wouldn't be able to evade.
Also what if you need to rush to the hospital and don't have time for an ambulance? Not great but better than someone dying because they didn't get attention in time.
Even ambulances aren't supposed to speed. They get their time savings with light switching devices and having traffic get out of the way. 99 percent of survivable medical crises have an hour to reach modern medicine as long as proper first aid has been applied.
It's also almost universally better to slow down than speed up to avoid an accident. Braking changes your speed far faster than speeding up. It also gives you better traction, (literally it loads the front turning wheels with extra weight), and makes a hit more survivable.
We all want to feel like we're in a Hollywood movie, but we just aren't.
I really think you are missing the point here. You say overspeeding may save you, which i think is a very theorical and not frequent occurence but ok, for the sake of argument let's allow 20kmh above the maximum speed limit, in my country that would be 150kmh, enough to get out of dangerous situation, still way bellow what modern car can do. And you really dont want to go above this kind of speed in urban environments if you're not a trained professional. Speed limit exist for a reason which extends beyond "when you agree with them" raming in another car and transforming a 1 people emergency into a multiple people one is not a risk we should consider acceptable.
You should probably read articles before commenting. The cars aren't reporting themselves.
If my car is going to be a snitch, I want a share of that fat ticket money. ;)
Pay me or GTFO.
Infinite money glitch?
Patent it so nobody is allowed to use it?
This was my thought as well. Just because they patent it, doesn’t mean they’ll use it. And it could keep other manufacturers from implementing similar systems.
From a product standpoint, I just don’t understand the reasoning here. Nobody wants this. It’s not a selling point. There is no way to make money off of this without the government getting involved. Just why?
Yeah exactly. Who is going to buy the car that tips off the cops?
Tbh, if all the ticketing was done automatically, then there would be less of a reason for cops, especially traffic cops. This decreasing their numbers. This could be a silver lining.
or, hear me out... we could just have cars that don't snitch on us and cops that work under strict scrutiny (or no cops at all if we took care of ourselves as a society)
Maybe if we didn't make city streets as wide as highways, people wouldn't drive so fast. I feel like it's obvious that people will drive faster between painted lines than if those lines were walls. Even lining a street with trees lowers speeds. An indirect side effect would be a drop in ticket revenue, but surely the police department would prefer safety over money.
surely the police department would prefer safety over money.
Having been in places with narrow streets and walls right there... Nope. Doesn't stop them.
I’m starting my attack run
What's especially hilarious is that my Ford Escape reads speed limit signs and then adjusts the cruise control to the new limit +5mph. They let you adjust that setting up to +/- 10mph, iirc.
Well yeah, they have to allow you wiggle room to knowingly break the law. How else are they going to maintain the partnership with law enforcement?
GM will be patenting LED windshields showing the middle-finger and blurring the license plate every time a Ford passes by.
Edit: I'm wrong, now I diverted rtfa. it's a camera system to detect other cars. My bad.
I don't understand your comment. GM own ford, right? And the data they are trying to share comes from the car itself, not other cars around it.
No, GM owns Chevrolet, GMC, and Cadillac.
Ford is Lincoln, mercury and Mazda
Not gonna lie, I've encountered enough F150 drivers to make this option tempting.
I'm curious if this would actually hold up in court as evidence that a person was speeding.
On its own to convict? Probably no. If the technology is hypothetically successful introduced and it pings to police, all they'd need to do is follow a route to the self-snitching vehicle and hit it with some of their own radar or lidar, then pull over the driver.
Noted: driving 3 mph under the speed limit in front of all fords from now on.
Go for 10mph under. Gotta really be safe.
but what if I only went above limit for 1 second by mistake? vigilante snitching is not the police to decide to give me ticket
And then selling a subscription to turn it off
Ha, you would think so, but from article it seems it'd snitch only on other vehicles. Now, a subscription for reporting a certain 'enemy' vehicle could be way to go. Edit: sneetch
"Sir, your Ford sent half an hour long video of this truck going 85 mph on 65 mph road. I would think you understand why you also got a ticket?"
Surely you understand that companies start with the seemingly innocuous execution that establishes the base infrastructure to gain adoption and then, when adoption moves beyond a certain percentage, they flip the switch to the thing they actually wanted. Also, go read about "enshitification".
Uber was more available and cheaper than taxis > uber kills taxis > now uber is more expensive and invasive than taxis were.
Surprised it took this long. Well, guess that means it's time to faraday cage the 5g radios in the vehicles or find a way to create a super small jammer that can only broadcast in your car. Some sort of license plate blocker that only shows at a certain angle too.
Fuck that shit.
You can get the license plate thingies on eBay
License plate blockers are illegal in most states now because of the implementation of privately owned license plate readers that track you and sell the data back to police.
Interesting. The article suggests the car would photograph others speeding rather than reporting itself.
Personally, I don't mind speeders so much except when they're weaving between traffic recklessly. I do really hate tailgaters though. So a rear-facing camera maybe?
I see Ford wants to produce only cop cars.
Ford trying to patent a way to bankrupt themselves for when no one ever buys another ford ever again.
Don't worry, the federal government will bail them out.
gotta syphon that money out of government somehow.
when are we gonna have biomedical devices that directly send their test results to health insurance companies? I feel like we are missing this for a perfect Dystopia
This is a weird one. I speed, and so does everyone else, but nobody has the right to speed, and I cant say it necessarily would be bad to have more speeding restrictions. Im sure it would be just as abused as any other part of the law and justice system but I dont find it inherently unappealing.
I speed, and so does everyone else
Why?
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. Speeders are assholes that put everyone in danger.
Get fucked if you speed. I lost several family members because of pricks like you and I even wound up hospitalized from it. Eat shit and piss off. Asswipes like you fucks don't need a drivers license since you don't know how to drive.
Cue the “I wasn’t driving, that was someone else!” Defense.
Give 'em hell, Monkey Man...
Should be Dodge
We've had the technology for a long time. And speeding really is a contributing factor to motor vehicle accidents and fatalities. If we're going to have a society that requires being in cars then we need to be a society with severe rules for putting the rest of us in mortal danger.
Make it automatic then, why report a crime when you can limit the speed. Cut out the middle man, also defund the police.
It looks like this system is designed to snitch on the other cars around the snitch car, rather than the snitch car itself.
I'd rather that too.
Why not just have a speed cap on cars?
Edit : I see I got a few dislikes. I was actually genuinely curious. Thanks for the answers!
Because it’s dangerous. Sometimes you have to exceed the speed limit to avoid a collision.
And have it auto adjust based on the roads limit. We have gps and data for every road. Driving is a privilege not a right, nobody has the right to speed faster than the posted limit.
No speed cap yet, but all new cars sold in the EU must have a signal that alerts the driver if they're driving faster than the current speed limit.
https://www.autoweek.com/news/a61532276/mandatory-speed-limiters-europe-cars/
How is this bad? Speeding is a huge problem ever since the Fast & Furious movies made young guys think it’s cool to drive 180km/h through cities.
Police. The problem is the police.
Fucking mouth breather
Do you think no one sped before fast and the furious a movie famously inspired by people driving like assholes on city streets?
No. But asshole drivers speeding, driving under the influence, running traffic stop lights/signs are still killing themselves and others at an impressive clip. And show no signs of slowing down - pun intended.
You would think that killing enough of those dumbasses would improve the breed like Darwin says it should. But nope.
Douchebags have been speeding since before FAF
But it's bad because say traffic is going 20 over the speed limit. You go with it since that's safer than going the speed limit. Then you get a ticket for it?
That’s not speeding, which means recklessly driving like a madman - and 20 mph over is not a small amount when the limit is 55.
The „it’s not illegal if everybody does it“ defence also isn’t going to help you. Because it’s the slipperiest of slopes.
I go over the limit sometimes, too, and when I get caught I pay the fine like an adult, instead of making up childish excuses why it was actually fine to do so.
And anyway, the fines are adjusted by how much you went over, if you just slightly go over, it’s cheaper.
So in summary, you’re an idiot and I hope you get caught doing something really bad soon,
You do realize the police will jump at the opportunity to give you a ticket for going 1 mph above the limit for 5 seconds while overtaking ?