Dangerous drivers beware: you are being watched

Enrique Dans
Enrique Dans
Published in
2 min readJust now

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IMAGE: An US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Jul. 18 2024, and was originally filed by Ford Jan. 12, 2023 detailing a system designed by Ford to report speeding cars
IMAGE: USPTO Jul. 18 2024, originally filed by Ford in January 12, 2023

A patent applied for by Ford in January 2023 and admitted in July 18th this 2024 points to the widespread use of sensors on cars to detect other vehicles exceeding the speed limit to photograph and report them to the police, thus contributing significantly to road safety.

Cars are increasingly equipped with a wide range of sensors capable of detecting speed, measuring distances and taking images or video, allowing them not only to keep in their lane, adapt their speed to the layout of the road and maintain a safe distance from other vehicles, but also of detecting obstacles or even activating all the cameras and recording video every time the driver presses the horn, to capture all the possible details of an incident. They can also automatically reduce the speed in certain traffic circumstances, adapt it to that of other vehicles on the road, or reduce it depending on the weather or light.

Other vehicles now have a “sentry mode” that automatically activates when the vehicle is parked, and takes several seconds of video of any person or vehicle that comes within a certain distance of it, keeping it in its storage unit for the owner to examine in the event of a break-in or tampering. It is also possible to activate the vehicle’s cameras remotely and monitor it in real time from an app on a smartphone, which would hypothetically turn the…

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Enrique Dans
Enrique Dans

Professor of Innovation at IE Business School and blogger (in English here and in Spanish at enriquedans.com)