Ford Global Technologies, LLC, a subsidiary of Ford, has received a patent for a system which facilitates cars on road to communicate with each other using cyrptocurrencies and reduce traffic.
The patent titled “Vehicle-to-Vehicle cooperation to marshal traffic” focuses on ways to alleviate traffic congestion, proposing that communication to coordinate speeds between vehicles can counteract, in part, with the psychology of human drivers who focus on their individual travel time preferences.
The document explains how a cryptocurrency, named CMMP token, will facilitate smooth flow of traffic.
“The CMMP system operates with individual token-based transactions, where the merchant vehicles and the consumers’ vehicles agree to trade units of cryptocurrency,” the patent says.
The participating merchant vehicles gain CMMP tokens from the consumer vehicle. In some examples, the time allotted to the request of the consumer vehicle is based on the number of CMMP tokens chosen by the consumer vehicle to be spent at that particular time.
“The CMMP tokens are used to validate and authorize a transaction in which, at consumer vehicle request, the merchant vehicles either occupy slower lanes of traffic themselves, or allow the consumer vehicle to merge into their own lane and pass as necessary,” the document says.
The patent further explains that the driver of a consumer vehicle which is running late for an appointment may request to pass any participating merchant vehicles for a duration of 10 minutes on a particular road or highway for 60 CMMP tokens, at a rate of 10 seconds preferential access per token.