Tech

Ford Wants Billboards to Beam Distracting Ads to Screens Inside Your Car

The company's recently-patented idea for in-car advertising sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
Janus Rose
New York, US
The dashboard of a car with a display and brown wood panel trim, as seen from the passenger's side
Bloomberg / Getty Images

Advertisers are motivated by a singular goal, and that is to turn every facet of human existence into an opportunity to show you ads.

According to a recently-published patent filed by American auto giant Ford, the latest frontier for this colonization is the inside of your car.

The company's patent filing describes a system that would equip cars with billboard-reading sensors, allowing cars to scan roadside signs for relevant information and then display them on screens inside smart cars. For example, driving past a McDonald's billboard would cause image and text recognition algorithms to automatically interpret the ad's contents, like an address or phone number, and then transmit that information to your car's dashboard display.

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You know, the screens you're supposed to avoid staring at in order to avoid crashing.

The patent filing also describes generating hyperlinks for internet-connected cars based on data gathered from segments of billboard images. 

A patent application diagram for billboard-scanning technology

A screenshot from Ford's patent filing, which describes a method for scanning billboard information and sending it to an in-car display.

To be fair, patent filings describe rough blueprints rather than existing technologies, and there's no telling how the company might deploy such a system—or whether it will materialize at all. But the idea of creating yet another vector for distracting ads—this time, inside high-speed motor vehicles—is terrifying nonetheless.

Each year in the U.S., there are on average 2,800 deaths and 400,000 injuries during crashes that involve a distracted driver, according to a 2018 report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The most common form of distracted driving—checking text messages—takes a driver's attention away from the road for roughly 5 seconds.

Ford hasn't acknowledged that it has any intent to deploy the billboard-scanning technology, telling Motor1 that the company "patents on new inventions as a normal course of business," and that the plans "aren’t necessarily an indication of new business or product plans.” But given the rise of image recognition in already accident-prone self-driving cars, the use of similar in-car systems may already be inevitable.