Patent published on July 17, 2020

Continental wants its Driverless Car to drive itself to a service center

You are driving on a road enveloped by the dark moonless night, surrounded by trees, headlight on high beam. You know your destination (and any civilization) is many miles away. 

Suddenly your car starts to sputter and comes to a slow halt.

Even if you know your way around the insides of a car, you wouldn’t like to be in this situation. 

Luckily you won’t have to live this nightmare in the future.

Being one of the top self-driving companies, Continental Automotive Systems, Inc. has filed for a patent application that can save you for the aforementioned nightmare.

The patent application discusses Continental driverless car that will have a feature to find the errors in the car and can inform you before it gets worse. 

So even if you aren’t sure if your carburetor is acting up (or what it is), your car will have your back. 

And how will it work?

Basically, when a part of your car will start acting up, the data processing hardware will snitch about the malfunctioning part to the computing processor

The processor will process the information (Duh.) and send an error message to you. 

And no it won’t be a lousy blinking light in your car’s dashboard. 

You will get a detailed description of the problem. 

It will also be sent to your mobile or laptop or pager or pigeon, basically any messenger of your choice.

The error message that will be circulated within the systems will have the following information- 

This diagram explains how various systems will communicate with each other when an error will occur within the car. 

The computing system will also keep track of the fault value.

Fault value is the time period and the number of events from the first fault message or error received.

So now the error has been identified. You know it, the car knows it, the processing system knows it. 

Now what?

The obvious course of action would be booking an appointment with the service center and driving your car there (or your car driving you there since it’s autonomous, but whatever.)

But your car will have your back, AGAIN!

When the system will analyze the error within the vehicle, it will look for the nearest service center and schedule an appointment. 

And no, it won’t randomly book an appointment and drive itself to the service center making you wonder if your car has grown sentience.

Or abandon in the morning when you’re late for work.

You will get a notification on your mobile regarding the error and if you would like to book a service appointment and when it will be suitable for you. 

And Voila! 

You won’t have to give service appointments a second thought! 

Or ever wonder where the mysterious noise in your car is coming from…

Autonomous Vehicles hold endless possibilities for the future. The innovation in this domain has constantly been on an upward curve since 2009 when Google announced to start their research in self-driving car.

The concept has been majorly popular ever since then and hopefully, we’ll see more innovation in this front. 

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