Anablog

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that tells of the King of England touring James Watt’s steam engine. The monarch was a bit bored and dismissive. He looked down his nose and said, “I can’t see of whatever good use it could be put to.” Watt, a little pissed off, responded, “One day you shall be able to tax it, sire.” So I guess governments all around the world are seeing that vehicle telematics can be used to report the mileage, speeds, locations and times that a car travels and, voila, they can tax you for your use. In some ways this is a needed advancement. One of the problems with electric cars and plug-in hybrids is that they don’t use gasoline. Oh, sure, that is the whole point to you and me, but governments need all the tax money they get from fuel taxes so they can build bridges to nowhere.

If you worry about the big brother aspects of this like I do, note that we are already there. Most modern vehicle engine control units (ECU) already records speeds and such. Police routinely have the modules examined after a fatal crash. And like all big-brother plans, there is a certain appeal to justice. A guy killed a child in a subdivision a few years ago and claimed he was going 20 mph. The ECU showed he was going 60 mph. He went to prison. Good riddance.

The scary thing about these telematic Big Brother proposals is that they could operate real-time. The next “advance” would be for the government to have the power to disable your car anytime they want. Late on your taxes? Missed that child-support payment? Well then you car will stop running on your way to work.  There are already products that police use to bathe your car in RF in order to kill the ignition, so wouldn’t it be simpler to just dial up a central computer and order your car to stop running? Most decent people will see the positive sides to the intrusion, at least until we live in a fascist dictatorship and all our cars stop running when we are trying to mosey down to Tiananmen Square.

Use the comments to let us know how you feel about this remote monitoring and control of your automobile. My buddy Dave Ruigh noted that here in California we all go get our cars smogged every two years. The DMV already knows how many miles we are putting on our car. If they want to charge for use based on weight and mileage, they can do this without resorting to telematics. All they have to do is a couple days of database programming up in Sacramento. I think the appeal of telematic monitoring of your car has a more sinister appeal to our leaders, but don’t look for them to tell us about it.