Jaguar wants to bring Iota wallet into the cars
Approaching Jaguar. Image by Eric Kilby via Flickr.com. License: Creative Commons
Not a Lamborghini, but at least a Jaguar: The traditional British automobile manufacturer is currently testing a smart wallet through which the luxury ranges use the cryptocurrency IOTA to pay for parking fees or to reward drivers whose cars report useful data.
Iota presents itself as the cryptocurrencies for machines and has already addressed some car companies such as Volkswagen. Surprisingly, the British car maker Jaguar Land Rover is the first to announce Iota into its weighing.
“With the ‘Smart Wallet’ technology,” writes the blog of the IOTA Foundation, “the owners of cars can automatically report useful data such as the road condition, traffic jams or potholes and receive credits for this. These credits can then redeem the drivers for rewards such as coffee or use them to automatically pay toll and parking fees or intelligent charging stations.”
“The technology of the connected cars we are currently working will be transformative and Jaguar or Land Rover will transform into a third room that complements the house or office,” comments Russell Vickers, the software architect of Jaguar Land Rovers, “In the future, an autonomous car can go to an charging station, charge and pay the bill, while the owner takes part in the sharing economy-and Earned rewards by reporting useful data.“Nick Rogers, head of Jaguar Land Rover’s product development, adds:“ Our software development center uses cryptocurrencies to make people’s lives better by allowing drivers to share and pay for data and pay through their car.”
In the development center in Shannon Irish, the engineers have already equipped several vehicles with the smart wallet, including the Jaguar F-Pace and the Range Rover Velar. The company does not yet want to announce when the technology will be launched.
Not much is known about concrete details yet. Are the loans a kind of token on the IOTA blockchain-or are it the IOTA units themselves? The data is used directly by Jaguar – or go to open platforms? The rewards will be high enough to be relevant for people who can afford a Jaguar?
Probably the more important function of the “smart wallet” will be to enable automatic payment. If the car automatically pays the parking fees or toll, it would be practical. The idea of turning a wallet into the basic component of a car is also tempting. The points that the drivers can earn should be a supplement, a method of motivating people to use the wallet too. If you want to pay more than you take, you will also have the opportunity to charge the wallet with conventional means of payment such as credit cards.
While the car maker Jaguar Land Rover should be familiar to everyone, Iota is not so well known for many. It is a cryptocurrency that uses the innovative Tangle consensus salgorithm. In contrast to blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, there are no blocks as data units, no miners and accordingly no transaction fees. However, with each transaction, users have to calculate a small proof-of-work themselves. IOTA promises to scale almost limitlessly and therefore to be able to become cryptocurrency for all machines in the world. However, there are reasons to see these promises critically – or at least wait for Iota to be decentralized. There is currently a central coordinator that coordinates the confirmations of transactions.
Cooperation with Jaguar Land Rover is in any case a big step for Iota. He could help the developers and the Berlin -based IOTA Foundation to achieve their goal – to the official blockchain or. To become cryptocurrencies for the Internet of Things. The price of IOTA reacts extremely happily to the news and shoots up to around 31 dollar cent by a good 17 percent.
