Ford Motor Co. has applied for a patent to make remote car repossession near-perfect for lenders, and deeply unpleasant for defaulting car owners, who can put up with an “incessant” sound, sweat the air-conditioning is off and , finally getting locked out of your car.
The patent application, published in late February, envisages a Big Brother repo that would trigger a series of pitfalls, some surprisingly clever, to ask owners to pay overdue bills or, in a self-driving future, a trip without driver in the rest yard. or scrap
Ford
F
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which last year got about 6 percent of its $158 billion in revenue from the Ford Credit lending unit, said through a spokesman that it has no intention of rolling out the system anytime soon.
There’s no denying, however, that rising interest rates, higher car prices, longer and higher car payments, and rising recovery rates are part of what makes patents like these imaginable.
“Additional degree of discomfort”
The patent describes the steps to be taken if an owner ignores overdue warnings, starting with those intended to cause “an additional level of inconvenience to the driver and vehicle occupants” by turning off nice features like air conditioning, remote key fobs , and the automated door locking and unlocking system.
Another step described in the remote reset patent application included asking the car’s audio system to “play an incessant, unpleasant sound whenever the owner is present in the vehicle.”
The repo system would control various ways to “make the sound unpleasant” and ensure that the owner could not “turn it off without first contacting the lending institution”.
The final steps could include a complete lockout, and if that still doesn’t work, a 1916 invention, the tow truck, would be called in remotely. The vehicle could be asked to move and park in a better location for the tow truck.
A future fully autonomous vehicle could dispense with all this and drive itself to the scrap yard, or to the scrap yard if the system calculates that the costs of the scrap exceed the value of the car.
As dystopian as it sounds, Ford’s patent application offers the idea that perhaps some of its measures of last resort, such as locking, could only happen on weekends or allow limited use of the vehicle within d ‘a non-geosearch zone. away from the owner’s house.
The rest procedure could also be lifted temporarily to allow drivers to get to a hospital in an emergency, according to the patent application.
“Death Switches”
Automakers like Ford typically file thousands of patent applications a year.
According to the company, Ford received 1,342 patents last year.
“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,” the spokesperson said.
Once published, patent applications usually go through several rounds of requests for clarification and more information before being approved or denied.
If a patent is granted, the inventor has the right to decide who can use the technology for decades. It is not uncommon for companies to own intellectual property just to have it, or to prevent competitors from owning it.
The Ford app is short on technical information and long on creativity. But its spirit is not entirely new.
Some means of remotely disabling a car to recover it have existed for decades. Some lenders have used “kill switches” or start-stop devices, accompanied by GPS trackers, usually in the context of buyers with bad credit.
Consumer protection regulators recently said they want to collect information on this and other aspects of the opaque car loan and repo businesses, including immobilizers.
Over the years, industry watchers have said that “kill switches,” however reviled and in the regulatory spotlight, are perhaps a better alternative than spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars to restore a reservoir car.
Americans have been willing to overextend themselves for bigger, better, newer cars for decades, and an era of low interest rates only provided more fuel for that fire.
According to Edmunds, the average car payment in January was $728, up nearly 50% from the average of $491 in January 2015. Cars have become increasingly expensive as their systems become more complex, full of safety and infotainment functions, and the vehicles themselves. they are bigger and heavier.
American automakers, in line with customer tastes, have focused on SUVs and pickup trucks that are often substantially more expensive than sedans. New vehicle options under $20,000 are few and far between.
Last year, General Motors Co
GM
The Chevrolet division discontinued production of its Chevy Spark, one of the last remaining sub-$15,000 new cars available to consumers.
Wall Street this week blamed Tesla Inc.
TSLA
for failing to provide details of a future electric vehicle that would cost less than the $40,000 Tesla charges for its cheapest electric vehicle.
