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Jaguar Land Rover planning to allow owners to earn cryptocurrency

Jaguar Land Rover, Britain's largest auto manufacturer, said on Monday it is testing software that will allow drivers of its cars to earn the IOTA cryptocurrency as a reward for sharing data. The company is developing what it calls "smart wallet" technology to be installed in its automobiles. This would reward Jaguar car drivers with IOTA coins for actions such as enabling their vehicles to automatically report useful data, such as traffic congestion or potholes to navigation providers or local authorities. Drivers could also earn rewards if the car participates in a ride-sharing program, Jaguar said. The tokens earned could be used to pay for tolls, parking and charging for electric cars. The overall goal was to "achieve zero emissions, zero accidents, and zero congestion," the company said. Global car companies are exploring blockchain applications, figuring out different ways in which they can leverage the technology to suit their different needs. Blockchain, the system powering cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, is a shared database that is maintained by a network of computers connected to the internet. The British car company is testing the technology at the new Jaguar Land Rover software engineering base in Shannon, Ireland, where engineers have already equipped several vehicles, including the Jaguar F-PACE and Range Rover Velar, with "smart wallet" features, the company said. It does not yet have a timetable for when it will be commercially available, said Jaguar, a subsidiary of Tata Motors. The IOTA token is based on a distributed ledger technology that enables people and machines to transfer money and data without any transaction fees. IOTA trades on digital asset exchanges and was last at 27 U.S. cents per token. "The smart wallet technology ... can be easily adapted into all new vehicles," Dominik Schiener, IOTA co-founder and co-chairman of its board, told Reuters on Friday. "IOTA wants to enable interoperability with all these different players. So there is no Jaguar coin, no BMW coin, but one universal token for this machine economy," he added.

Jaguar Land Rover Special Vehicle Operations could build standalone models

Jaguar Land Rover may be set to turn its Special Vehicle Operations division into something much bigger than a mere in-house tuner. Bloomberg spoke to the head of JLR's high-performance, customization outfit, John Edwards, who hinted that his team may move beyond simply modifying F-Types, Range Rovers and the like. "We're certainly looking at that, and we've got the capability to do that," Edwards told AN. "Is there an opportunity for us to do a completely standalone car? Maybe." Such a move into full-scale, standalone models would be a big step, particularly for a division that's still kind of in its infancy. Bloomberg references the success of Mercedes-AMG, but the German division has had the benefit of decades of growth. AMG spent years and years building high-performance versions of all manner of mainstream Mercedes vehicles, before moving onto cars like the SLS AMG and AMG GT, which have no mainstream analog. In other words, AMG had a long time to develop a reputation building high-performance vehicles that people know and recognize before it moved into building vehicles of its own. We aren't entirely convinced that SpecOps wouldn't benefit from taking a similar approach, delivering additional SVR vehicles, like the rumored XE SVR, before striking out on its own. We'd like to know what you think, though. Is it already time for Special Vehicle Operations to build standalone models, or should it learn to walk before it runs by modifying more of Jaguar Land Rover's existing product. Have your say in Comments. Related Video:

Jaguar Land Rover and Cambridge have developed a touchless touchscreen

Jaguar Land Rover and the University of Cambridge are working on new touchscreen technology that eliminates the need to touch the screen. Counterintuitive, right? It’s called “predictive touch” for now, in part because the system is able to predict what you might be aiming for on the screen.  The video at the top of this post is the best way to understand how users will interact with the tech, but weÂ’ll do some more explaining here. You simply reach out with your finger pointing toward the item on screen that you want to select. ItÂ’ll highlight the item and then select it. HereÂ’s how it works, according to the University of Cambridge: “The technology uses machine intelligence to determine the item the user intends to select on the screen early in the pointing task, speeding up the interaction. It uses a gesture tracker, including vision-based or radio frequency-based sensors, which are increasingly common in consumer electronics; contextual information such as user profile, interface design, environmental conditions; and data available from other sensors, such as an eye-gaze tracker, to infer the userÂ’s intent in real time.” Cambridge claims that lab tests showed a 50 percent reduction in both effort and time by the driver in using the screen, which would theoretically translate to more time looking at the road and less time jabbing away at the screen. If the prediction and machine learning tech is good enough, we could see this resulting in a reduced number of accidental inputs. However, on a certain level it almost sounds more difficult to point at a screen while moving than it does to actually touch a section of that screen. Without using the tech and its supposedly great predictive abilities, we canÂ’t come to any grand conclusions. One comparison you may already be thinking of is BMWÂ’s Gesture Controls. ItÂ’s already been addressed with a subtle diss from Cambridge: “Our technology has numerous advantages over more basic mid-air interaction techniques or conventional gesture recognition, because it supports intuitive interactions with legacy interface designs and doesnÂ’t require any learning on the part of the user,” said Dr Bashar Ahmad of the University of Cambridge. Of course, this tech can be used for much more than just vehicle touchscreen control. Cambridge says it could be integrated into ATMs, airport check-in kiosks, grocery store self checkouts and more.