Today UK car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover announced its Internet of Things (IoT) project with the IOTA Foundation. The firms are developing cryptocurrency style ‘credits’ to be earned by drivers for reporting live data. The credits can be spent automatically for traditionally cash-based driving payments, such as highway tolls.
The partnership is currently developing smart wallets with IOTA’s distributed ledger technology (DLT) framework. They will enable car owners to earn credits by collecting driving condition data, such as potholes and traffic jams, then redeem them to pay for tolls, parking, charging electric cars or even coffee. Credits can also be bought with conventional card payments.
Today’s release claims that vehicles have been successfully equipped with the technology, trialed at the manufacturer’s software engineering center in the Republic of Ireland. The smart wallet project is part of Jaguar Land Rover’s Destination Zero initiative, working towards “zero accidents, zero congestion, and zero emissions”.
Nick Rogers, the Executive Director of Product Engineering, said that the firm “is advancing the use of cryptocurrency to make people’s lives better, by allowing drivers to safely share data and make payments from their vehicle.”
Jaguar Land Rover, which is the UK’s largest car manufacturer, states that incentivizing the reporting of traffic data would lead to fewer jams and exhaust fumes from idling cars. Last year, the company sold nearly 600,000 vehicles in 128 countries and plans to integrate them as “data gatherers” in the future of the IoT.
“Jaguar Land Rover is embracing autonomous, connected, electrified and shared mobility technology as we endeavour to make cars safer, cleaner and smarter for everybody,” Rogers continued.
IOTA is one of the leading brands for the IoT in the blockchain space. Its Germany based non-profit foundation aims to keep its technology open source and relevant. IOTA is not technically a blockchain, but a DLT structure called a ‘Tangle’ or ‘DAG’, which by design eliminates transaction fees.
“Our distributed ledger technology is perfectly suited to enable machine-to-machine payments for smart charging, parking and tolls, in addition to creating opportunities for drivers to earn their own digital currency,” said Holger Köther, IOTA’s Director of Partnerships.
There’s another mobility project which involves a Jaguar car, but the car company is not directly involved. Bosch is providing a Jaguar I-PACE for the Smart E-Mobility Challenge being run by the Trusted IoT Alliance (TIoTA).
In the first half of last year, Daimler ran a Mobility Coin program with 500 Daimler employees. The project was a token-based rewards system to encourage environmentally friendly driving. BMW and Porsche have also disclosed blockchain experiments.
