Car theft: Will vehicles soon be able to obey only their owners?

A technology inspired by what we already have on our smartphones: driver facial recognition or fingerprint recognition. In other words, the car, thanks to a smart camera, is able to recognize its owner's face. And if it's not the owner who tries to open or start the car, it refuses to open or even start.

This innovation was presented by Continental at the last CES in Las Vegas. Two cameras are used: the first is placed on the central pillar, between the front and rear doors. As you approach, no need to take out your keys: it opens automatically. Once behind the wheel, the same thing happens: to start the car, you simply show your face to a second camera.

This can be facial recognition or iris recognition. Obviously, it's configurable: you can give access to your spouse, your children, a friend. You can also use it for car sharing. Even with a mask or showing a photo of yourself to the camera, the car won't start. Unless you hack the car, which requires a certain expertise, theft becomes almost impossible.

This technology already exists on a Hyundai SUV: it allows you to open the door, and to start the car, you use your fingerprints. Basically, as with smartphones, the idea is to harness the full potential of biometrics and make you, and your body, the key.

Front-facing cameras, rear-view cameras, driver assistance cameras, dashcams... We already have a lot of on-board cameras today, so we might as well use them. For example, to develop highly personalized air conditioning: soon, the car will be able to analyze the specific needs of each passenger and adapt to them, because we are not all sensitive to the cold in the same way.

The cameras will detect whether the passenger seat is a man, whether he is heavily dressed or not, what his heart rate is—which can indicate a level of fatigue and therefore sensitivity to the cold—and his morphology as well. Depending on all this, the passenger compartment will send a different level of heat to the occupied seat. For example, if the car detects that I am rather thin and wearing a t-shirt, while my neighbor is more heavily built and wearing a down jacket, the heat diffused will not be the same for him and for me.

Thermal panels integrated into the doors will diffuse this targeted heat. The car of tomorrow will also be able to analyze heartbeats, and eventually, it will even be able to detect a potential heart problem. A sort of medical assistant on wheels.

A technology that uses the car's cameras allows emergency services to see "through the eyes" of the vehicle in the event of an accident, so to speak. Imagine I'm in an accident: I press an SOS button on the dashboard (and if I can't, the car calls itself). At that point, the car gives the emergency call center access to all its onboard equipment: cameras, sensors.

Operators can then see if I'm conscious, injured, and how many people are on board. They can also access the controls, activate the warning lights, and even, in the future, take control of the car remotely to make it safe. A blend of human and artificial intelligence that could save lives.