How Toyota plans to leverage Blockchain to make autonomous driving a reality

You press a button. In a very short period of time, a car shows up.

Raúl Kripalani
Aug 24, 2017 · 5 min read

In episode 010 of the Blockchain Innovation podcast, Chris Ballinger, CFO and Director of Mobility Services for the Toyota Research Institute, said:

You press a button. In a very short period of time, a car shows up. Takes you where you want to go, drops you off.

All the negotiation of payment, who you are, your reputation, the car’s reputation, the contract.

All of those are potential applications for the kinds of things that Blockchain does so well.

Toyota is betting on Blockchain heavily. The problem with everybody owning their own car, is that cars end up .

On average, . Yes, you read that right.

insurance, maintenance, parking, driving license renewals, etc. Is that overhead worth it if you’re only using your car 5% of the time?


Mobility-as-a-Service

Toyota is betting on a future where mobility is practiced on demand. In other words, .

There is a (either stationed or roaming around), and you request one by using an application on your device.

The car takes you where you want to go, you pay for ride and you get off.

The ecosystem

it must be capable of finding a recharging station — and all other services it needs — all by itself.

Of course, Toyota doesn’t plan to deploy recharging stations everywhere in the world for their vehicles. Instead, they envision an , much like there are petrol stations, car washes, insurance companies, etc. all around the globe.

But the key difference with today is that with those services, as well as perform trades immediately: by exchanging currency or some other token representing value.


Who would own it? Would it comply with all legal regulations across the globe? How secure would it be? Who would manage it?

Centralization is not the answer.


Transactions on the Blockchain

So say you’ve called an autonomous vehicle and it’s about to pick you up. I will abbreviate “transaction” with TX.

Imagine this flow:

  1. , but since it was not carrying a human until it picked you up, it .
  2. As soon as you hop on, . It does this by making a TX with a smart contract that covers the car + 1 human .
  3. It starts driving. But alas, it needs to . It makes a TX on the blockchain with another smart contract to pay the toll. A deposit is paid upfront for the entire length of the toll road.
  4. It continues driving. When it leaves the toll road, it makes another TX with the previous smart contract. It gets the deposit back, minus the cost of the trip on the toll road (based on the number of kilometers).
  5. It drops you off at the destination. You pay the car by issuing a TX on the blockchain.
  6. The car notices it’s low on battery and it’s also dirty. You littered a bit. So it charges you a soiling fee via the blockchain, and also decreases your reputation by –1 points by making another TX on the blockchain.
  7. Since it has collected your transportation fee, plus the soiling charge, it first finds a recharging station and recharges itself. It pays the owner of the station (it could be someone’s home) via a TX on the blockchain.
  8. Then it goes to a cleaning service (is this human-operated or automated? If human… is this what we’ve been relegated to? 🤔) and pays via a TX on the blockchain to get itself shiny and hospitable again.

That is, unless this happens to it:

A trap for self-driving cars.

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About the author

My name is Raúl Kripalani and I’m a backend & distributed systems engineer, turned into a Blockchain geek and consultant.

Feel free to connect with me on Twitter and/or LinkedIn. If you want to reach out directly: raul@consensusx.com.

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Raúl Kripalani

Written by

🎈 Engineer @ Protocol Labs, working on libp2p. Previously: ConsenSys, Red Hat, FuseSource, Atos, freelance. From Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain.

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