By
Chimamanda U. Martha
April 25th, 2024
Jaguar Land Rover is testing software that will allow drivers to earn the IOTA as a reward for sharing data. IOTA immediately reacts growing by more than 20%.
Britain’s largest auto manufacturer, Jaguar Land Rover, partnered with major cryptocurrency aimed at the Internet of Things, IOTA and is testing a new service that will allow drivers to earn cryptocurrency and make payments on the move.
The company is developing a so-called “smart wallet” technology which will be installed in its automobiles. In that way, Jaguar car drivers would be rewarded with IOTA coins for actions such as enabling vehicles to automatically report useful data, such as traffic congestion or potholes to navigation providers or local authorities.
From the company, they said that the drivers could also earn rewards if the car participates in a ride-sharing program. The tokens earned could be used to pay for tolls, parking and charging for electric cars.
Jaguar Land Rover Software Architect Russell Vickers stated:
“In the future, an autonomous car could drive itself to a charging station, recharge and pay, while its owner could choose to participate in the sharing economy – earning rewards from sharing useful data such as warning other cars of traffic jams.”
It will certainly be interesting to see how the competitors (yes Elon, we are talking about you here) will react, especially knowing that Jaguar Land Rover is making an electric vehicle push. Just for reminder, Tesla‘s CEO Elon Musk recently revealed that the company decided to compete Uber and Lyft by using its strategy for an autonomous ride-hailing fleet.
The IOTA Foundation’s Holger Köther added:
“Our distributed ledger technology is perfectly suited to enable machine-to-machine payments for smart charging, parking, and tolls, in addition to creating opportunities for drivers to earn their own digital currency.”
Some tweeters hurried up to “warn” about “the virus being spread”.
BREAKING: Jaguar Land Rover has partnered with IOTA to enable car owners & drivers to earn cryptocurrency.
We’re talking digital wallets, tokens, and an entire ecosystem.
THE VIRUS IS SPREADING 🚀
— Pomp 🌪 (@APompliano) April 28, 2019
Exactly, the virus of critical vulnerabilities is spreading. 🤣
— elizabeth stark 🍠 (@starkness) April 29, 2019
Dominik Schiener, IOTA co-founder and co-chairman of its board said:
“The smart wallet technology… can be easily adapted into all new vehicles… 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.”
The company did not specify exactly when this new service could be launched, but they said that the technology is being trialed at the new Jaguar Land Rover software engineering base in Shannon, Republic of Ireland, where engineers have already equipped several vehicles, including the Jaguar F-PACE and Range Rover Velar, with ‘Smart Wallet’ functionality.
The new service is part of Jaguar Land Rover’s Destination Zero strategy which aims to achieve zero emissions, zero accidents, and zero congestion.
Nowadays, global car companies are all about exploring blockchain applications, trying to figure out different ways in which they can leverage the technology to suit their different needs.
However, not everybody is convinced IOTA was the right choice and the Bitcoin maximalists chimed in as expected:
https://twitter.com/Josh_Rager/status/1122695387217842182?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1122695387217842182&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsbtc.com%2F2019%2F04%2F29%2Fiota-pumped-20-on-big-automobile-partnership%2F
As expected IOTA markets reacted instantly and the token surged from an intraday low of $0.26 to $0.33 adding almost 20% in the past 24 hours. Daily volume had also doubled from $10 million to $25 million at the time of writing. The 20 percent pump has been a long time coming for IOTA which has dropped way down the market cap charts in recent months.
Since the beginning of the year, IOTA has lost 13 percent and has been extremely bearish. In contrast coins like BNB have made 300 percent this year so IOTA has a lot of catching up to do.
However, this IOTA’s move could be probably predicted since last week at the Paris Blockchain Week Summit when Schiener noted that they expect the entire year to be really exciting because they are focused on making IOTA the first enterprise-ready permission-less ledger.