“You press a button. In a very short period of time, a car shows up.” On a recent , Chris Ballinger, CFO and Director of Mobility Services for the , said: podcast Toyota Research Institute You press a button. In a very short period of time, a car shows up. Takes you where you want to go, drops you off. The negotiation of payment, who you are, your reputation, the car’s reputation, the contract… All of those are potential applications for the kinds of things that Blockchain does so well. Toyota is . Truth be told: the problem with everybody owning a , is that cars are effectively . betting on Blockchain heavily car underutilized On average, . Yes, you read that right. cars are parked 95% of the time insurance, maintenance, parking, driving license renewals, etc. Is that overhead worth it if you’re only using your car 5% of the time? On top of that, owning a car comes with fixed costs: Mobility-as-a-Service Toyota is betting on a future where mobility is practiced on demand. In other words, . mobility becomes a service rather than a resource you own There is a (either stationed or roaming around), and you request one by using an application on your device. fleet of autonomous cars in a city The car takes you where you want to go, you pay for ride and you get off. It then becomes available again to drive somebody else. The ecosystem it must be capable of finding a recharging station — and all other services it needs — all by itself. Since there is nobody driving the car, Of course, companies like Toyota don’t plan to deploy recharging stations everywhere in the world for their vehicles. Instead, they envision an , much like there are petrol stations, car washes, insurance companies, etc. all around the globe. economy/ecosystem of services surrounding the car But the key difference with today is that with those services, as well as perform trades immediately: by exchanging currency or some other token representing value. the car must be able to communicate Hello, Smart Contracts. Creating a single central database in the world for all these partners and transactions is impracticable. Who would own it? Would it comply with all legal regulations across the globe? How secure would it be? Who would manage it? Centralization is not the answer. Enter the blockchain . Transactions on the Blockchain So say you’ve called an autonomous vehicle and it’s about to pick you up. I will abbreviate “transaction” with TX. Imagine this flow: , but since it was not carrying a human until it picked you up, it . Insurance: The vehicle has an insurance policy only covers the car As soon as you hop on, . It does this by making a TX with a smart contract that covers the car + 1 human . the vehicle upgrades the policy to cover one human (you) until the estimated time of arrival (ETA) It starts driving. But alas, it needs to . It makes a TX on the blockchain with another smart contract to pay the toll. A deposit is paid upfront for the entire length of the toll road. Toll roads: access a toll road It continues driving. When it leaves the toll road, it makes another TX with the previous smart contract. It gets the deposit back, minus the cost of the trip on the toll road (based on the number of kilometers). It drops you off at the destination. You pay the car by issuing a TX on the blockchain. The car pays the insurance fee, prorated by the amount of time you actually spent in the car (both the start and the end of the trip were registered on the blockchain). The car then downgrades the insurance to a “zero humans” coverage. Payment: vehicle + 1 human The car notices it’s low on battery and it’s also dirty. So it charges you a soiling fee via the blockchain, and also decreases your reputation by –1 points by making another TX on the blockchain. Battery and soiling: You littered a bit. Since it has collected your transportation fee, plus the soiling charge, it first finds a recharging station and recharges itself. It pays the owner of the station via a TX on the blockchain. Recharging: (it could be someone’s home!) Then it goes to a cleaning service and pays via a TX on the blockchain, to get itself shiny and hospitable again. Cleaning: (is this human-operated or automated? If human… is this what we’ve been relegated to? 🤔) That is, unless this happens to it: It is now available to pick up another passenger. A trap for self-driving cars. 👉 For about blockchain, make sure to on Medium. top articles follow both, consensusX and me If you enjoyed this article, please on Medium (clap/heart it!), and on Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. recommend it share it About the author My name is Raúl Kripalani and I’m a backend & distributed systems engineer. I currently work for on building a modular network stack for P2P networks called . Protocol Labs libp2p Feel free to connect with me on Twitter and/or LinkedIn .

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