How the blockchain could shape mobility

The blockchain is a really hot topic right now. There are dozens of projects around, trying to solve problems in a variety of technologies. These projects often don't have a lot in common, except for the underlying idea of decentralisation and therefore the blockchain technology. Quite a lot of projects are focused around payments. There are several cryptocurrencies around, all of them seeking to replace central banks. But there are a lot more potential applications for this technology, a lot of them may be in the area of mobility.

Autonomous vehicles

Ever since Google started working on self-driving cars they became a really hot topic in a lot of industries. In the last few years a lot of big car manufacturers announced self driving vehicles coming in the near future. While this new and still evolving technology could and will have great impact on the future of mobility for everyone, the idea offers a lot of potential applications for the blockchain.
Autonomous vehicles need data, a lot of it. A lot it comes from sensors built into the car itself. The car can track the distance to surrounding vehicles and the speed of them and using this collected information to decide how to drive. While a lot of the information is collected by the vehicle, it makes sense to share some of it with other cars. This data can be crowdsourced by the cars and used to build a swarm intelligence. The vehicles could coordinate acceleration for example at a traffic light turning green and dramatically decrease the number of traffic jams.

Drones coordination their behaviour to fly in a formation - Source: YouTube

However, for all of this to be possible, the cars need a secure and reliable way for communication. This is where the blockchain comes in. The huge advantage of such systems is the reliability. Due to the distributed nature of blockchain applications it becomes harder for attackers to bring this system down. The more people participate in a system like this, the more secure this becomes. Therefore, if all cars would become a node themselves it would add a lot of security to this system.

Carsharing

As soon as cars become capable of driving around by themselfes, the technology opens the doors for new business ideas. One idea which has been around for quite some time is based on carsharing. The idea is to let the car drive other people around, if its not needed by the owner. This would make private cars autonomous taxis.

The Porsche Mission E Concept uses blockchain technology to securely grant access to the car using a smartphone

But if we want to grant strange people access to our car, we'd need a really secure way to do this. One way to accomplish this was showcased by Porsche earlier this year. The modified Porsche Panamera used blockchain technology to open the trunk without needing the actual keys. This could be used for package delivery or, as already mentioned, for car sharing.

Payments

As cars are getting more and more connected, they will have to make payments at some point in the future. For example, a self-driving car driving to a charging station would need to pay for the electricity or for a parking lot. All of this could be done with cryptocurrencies. However, in order to accomplish this, current technologies still need to evolve. Currently, Bitcoin transactions are too expensive and slow to be used them under such circumstances. But as alternative blockchain approaches like IOTA and Cardano continue their development, this is very likely to change in the future.