Ford has recently filed a patent for an in-car advertisement system which runs through the stereo. You pay for the vehicle, but Ford wants to run commercials in it as a way to make even more off you. We haven’t seen anything this ridiculous since BMW’s heated seats subscription.
California has considered paying people to not own a car.
As enthusiasts we’ve dreaded cars becoming big smartphones on wheels, something which is increasingly turning into reality. While it’s great to have all kinds of convenient features, a lot of the fun of driving is getting sucked away as almost nothing is analog and things become increasingly automated.
Even worse, marketers are finding new ones to push their wares at you while you’re just driving little Timmy to soccer practice or are headed to and from work. Ford wants to help them do that by “determining vehicle information for a trip” like the speed, location, traffic, drive mode, and whose key fob was used to start it, customizing in-vehicle advertisements so they’re more targeted.
We seem to remember in that old Tom Cruise movie Minority Report they had something like this and back in the day people were saying that would never happen. Yet here we are.
In a way this reminds us of the gas station pumps which play those horrible, super loud videos while you stand there desperately trying to ignore it as your ears bleed.
The plan appears to be that something will display on the infotainment screen, we’re not sure if it’s a static image or a video, and probably some audio plays. Considering driver distraction is already a huge problem, why does Ford think this is even remotely a good idea?
Ther are many possible approaches to this in the patent filing, so the automaker has obviously put a lot of thought into this patent. And why not? Can you imagine how much it would make off these ads?
Just don’t get your hopes up about Ford knocking a few thousand or so off the price of your car, even though it will push annoying commercials at you while you’re driving. Instead, you’ll still pay an arm and a leg for your new Bronco and you’ll like the in-vehicle ads or else.
Image via Ford
Follow The Auto Wire on Google News.
+ There are no comments
Add yours