Ford is attempting to patent a system that allows its cars to detect and report speeding cars to the police. The patent application titled “Systems and Methods for Detecting Speeding Violations” was filed by the American carmaker over a year ago in January 2023 and published by the US Patent and Trademark Office earlier in July 2024.
In the patent filing, the company suggests using cars around each other to monitor each other’s speeds. This means that if a nearby car is speeding, a Ford vehicle fitted with the right hardware can determine the speeding infringement, take a picture, and identify the features of the targeted vehicle. Once done, it can send that information to a central server and a nearby police car or monitoring unit over an internet connection.
Ford claims that using citizen vehicles to monitor speeding violations on the road will make life easier for law enforcement, as they won’t have to identify violators and pursue them quickly. The company also seems to have plans to delegate some of this work to self-driving cars equipped with violation-detecting capabilities.
While this could be great news to law enforcement, the patent does leave a few questions about the privacy implications that turning every new Ford on the road into a surveillance camera is bound to raise. A Ford spokesperson told the Motor Authority that the patent “does not state that driving data from customers’ vehicles would be shared with law enforcement.”
However, Motor Authority reports that their reading of the patent doesn’t answer questions about the scope and limit of the tech. At the moment, it seems that law enforcement is just one of the many use cases that Ford is considering, likely to make the concept more appealing before rolling it out.
That said, car companies often file patents for tech that don’t necessarily make it to production vehicles, so it remains to be seen whether any meaningful implementation of this system would ever see the light of day.
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