Imagine falling behind on your car payments and your vehicle turning off its AC to pressure you into paying.
Days go by and then your car closes in on you. Finally, your car drives off on its own.
Ford Motor Co. filed for a patent last month that would use the future car’s technology to help car recovery.
While Ford said it has no plans for the technology — the company has said it files an average of three patents a day on potential technology — the patent shows how cars could one day lose their status as the embodiment of of American independence.
Ford’s patent application describes several ways future car technology could help with repos when payments are late.
First, a lender would send a message through the car’s computer to a screen or to the owner’s phone, confirming that the owner is behind on payments.
Ford’s patent application shows how the company would use Internet cloud technology to allow lenders to start repossessing a car.
If an owner doesn’t respond to that message, the car’s computer could begin disabling parts of the vehicle to “cause an additional level of annoyance” to induce payments, the patent says.
The car could turn off the air conditioning, radio or key fob. Or it could lock the owner or disable the steering wheel, lights or brakes.
The car could also be restricted to a certain geographical area. In an emergency, an owner could drive to a hospital or meet an ambulance, the patent says.
In another scenario, if the car detects an owner trying to thwart recovery, such as keeping the car in a locked garage, the car will initiate a call to the police to file a report.
Ford’s patent application says autonomous vehicle recovery could reduce “collisions” that sometimes occur during recoveries.
While the idea of a car recovering autonomously is new, lenders for years have used “kill switches” in cars to lock out owners who fall behind on payments.
Last year, two car owners in Chicago filed a lawsuit after their dealers and lenders installed and activated kill switches on their cars, leaving their cars useless, parked on the streets for months during the moratorium of the recoveries in the first months of the COVID-19. 19 pandemic.
“It’s scary,” his attorney, Dan Schneider, said of Ford’s patent application. “It’s the science fiction version of the kind of technology in question [our] demand”.
Schneider said kill switches and self-driving cars bring a “fundamentally different burden that existed before, and additional humiliation” compared to old-school recovery.
Kill switches have also been used in cars to prevent drunk driving and have seen a recent surge in support as a way to combat vehicle theft. But automatically disabling a car for recovery can have unintended effects.
Schneider pointed to an example of a car being locked up on a street and receiving a fine.
“For someone who is struggling financially, it would be another burden,” Schneider said. “The other dimension is the human aspect of the day and the moment, and the potentially catastrophic effects it could have: going to work, going to school, medical care, doing it for a roommate, a neighbor “, he said.
