What Can CryptoCurrency Do For Automotive? Jaguar and Beyond.

On April 29th, 2019 IOTA announced a partnership with Jaguar. By applying a smart wallet software that uses IOTA technology, Jaguar is aiming to

1. Pay owners to share data such as road condition, traffic, accidents, ect,
2. Pay owners to participate in programs such as ride sharing,
3. Have vehicle to infrastructure(V2X) payment capability.

All three objectives can be done without cryptocurrency. Thus we should ask is cryptocurrency the best solution? Of course this is good PR for crypto, and maybe one day bring on more crypto users, but Jaguar is in business to be profitable not to simply support crypto.

Objective 2 and 3 are no brainer for those of us who believe in cryptocurrency. Using crypto as a currency for V2X has the same benefits as using crypto today. With crypto we get store of value, international and online settlements, global unit, low transaction fees, and etc. Unfortunately we are the minority. Majority of the population will prefer fiat, this will be a big challenge for Jaguar, but i’m glad Jaguar is taking the lead and hopefully more automakers will follow. Jaguar will benefit from not having to build their own payment network. If others follow Jaguar’s lead, we can avoid what happened in the phone industry(apple pay, android pay, samsung pay).

Solving objective 1 is where the distributed ledger shines. This is where Duane The Rock Johnson puffs his chest, raises his head, sticks out his nose, holds the mic to his mouth, says in the most manly of all man voice, “Do you smell….What the rock… is…. Cooking”, and finally finishes the smack down with the people’s elbow. Jaguar wants to build an environment that will pay users for data their vehicle collects from the surrounding. It only makes sense to use a distributed ledger. This way vehicle owners really own their data. As Omid Malekan said in his book The Story of the Blockchain, “blockchain is a technology that allows for something digital to exist in only one place”. By using a distributed ledger, Jaguar will redefine vehicle data ownership.

Jaguar has only talked about monetizing surrounding data e.g. road conditions, traffic, accidents. There is another set of data that can be monetize. Internal vehicle data. As you drive your vehicle, controllers such as engine controller, transmission controller, driver support controllers are all generating data. Modern vehicle controllers will broadcast this data on the Communication Area Network(CAN) bus which is then made available to all controllers on the network. This data is valuable to multiple industries. Insurance companies can use this data to localize risk management. They can analyze and understand that folks on the west coast of the U.S. drive much worse than folks on the east coast and adjust rates accordingly. This data can also provide value for automotive researchers. They are already using this data for development purposes. The difference though is today they must go out and get the data, and most likely it will be a small sample of the population only. Imagine researchers being able to get this data on demand, have a much larger sample size, and they pay you for it, if you choose to sell.

Many great development in the crypto and automotive space will happen over the next few years, and I can’t wait to see it unfold.

Sources
“CAN Bus Explained - A Simple Intro 2019.” CSS Electronics.
Omid Malekan. (2018). The Story of the Blockchain: Triple Smoke Stack.
Anne Smith. (2019, April 29). “Jaguar Land Rover and IOTA.” IOTA Blog.
Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss. (2019, April 29). “Jaguar Land Rover plans to trade data for cryptocash.” Automotive News Europe.
Photo by Alex Galperin on Unsplash