FINALLY, some good news!
Crawling over the US patent database, we saw the full gamut from Ford recently.
- The good: Autonomous vehicle operation in snow. How cool, if y’all ever seen how bad your typical human Chicagoan drives in snow, you’d love the idea of snow-bots, too.
- The great: Vehicle closure member systems with integrated bottle opener features. Hah, I can finally stop using my boot to just kick the bottles open!
- The ugly: Crowdsource tracking of vehicles having disabled communication systems. Aw, that’s just terrible, that’s nightmare fuel, stop that. Read more about Ford’s patented dystopia here.
Then, there’s this absolutely fantastic patent. The name really buries the lede, so I’ll explain. If you like car rides half as much as my dog does, you’re going to love it.
“Vehicle Having Pet Detection and Control”
The name doesn’t sell it right. On the one hand, sure-sure-sure, cool, it can detect your pet. That’s neat, I guess. Make sure the AC is on and the temperature is comfy, good, but nothing to really write home about.
Oh right, and disabling the powered window buttons inside the cab when the little guy is scrambling around back there, that’s absolutely amazing, actually. I love that.
This is patent number US 20240399986 A1, for my patent-heads.
The real feature here is buried in the filing: it can detect your dog, and feed that information to an automated treat dispenser. If you have to pop into the store, and Rover starts barking, the machine will know and can automatically become dog’s best friend! Or you can absolutely blow your dog’s mind by manually giving them a treat, but through an app, rather than by hand.
“I LOVE FORD MOTOR COMPANY!” – the world’s most enthusiastic car ride fan.
I polled my dog to see what the paws on the ground thought. I know, sample size of one, but I work with what I got. Call it a convenience sample.
I got as far as saying the word “treat dispenser,” and Sweet Man is jumping all over me. He loves it, two paws up, I just got a thousand kisses.
Honestly, if I say the words “in a car” he’ll naturally take it to “car ride,” and then I’ll never hear the end of it, so I’m going to cut this poll early to avoid breaking any hearts.
Now, Sweet Man is terrifyingly clever (he gets that from his mother). So, I give him about a week with the new Ford before he starts training the car to feed him treats. He’ll suddenly gets all kind of anxious, barking at shadows, kicking the dispenser and such until that well runs dry. We’ll see how well the Ford engineers get the details right when faced down by our four-legged friends and their treat-seeking animal cunning.
There’s a Catch: A Whole Lot of Sensors Watching You and Rover, All the Time
Now, because it’s FuelArc News, and we’re apparently the Debbie downers of the automotive comedy game, we should probably mention the catch.
This always-on dog tracking tech? Well, they want to get real granular with it. And I mean, real granular. That means microphone, video cameras, and a cabin-scanning radar… all for the purpose of detecting your dog.
Now, I don’t feel like I’m going far into tin-foil hat territory when I scratch my chin and ask “hmm, is that REALLY why Ford wants an always-on mic, camera, and radar in my ride?”
Probably not, this is the company that brought you the patent for eavesdropping on your infotainment mic to serve you more advertisements. So plan on all those sensors being used to their fullest and most dystopian extremes.
“Y’all Know How Patents Work, Right?”
Standard patent disclaimer, you know the drill. Patents are not a guarantee that a technology will hit production. That just means the company is filing “dibs,” basically, and nobody else can claim to have invented the tech first. So, automated treat dispensers and their horrible always-on camera and radar sensor suite, they might happen, or they might not happen.
Time will tell!
It’s an Idea for the Dogs
I thought there was nothing I could do get the Sweet Man more amped up for car rides.
If a natural human body maxes out at an excitement level of ten, Sweets is at an eleven every time we go to the grocery store, and just plain forget about it if he recognizes the sights on the way to his Grandma’s house. He knows, and he is a howling, weepy mess by the time we arrive.
So, call this the rarest of technological developments from Ford… something we’re actually excited about!
