R3 and Audi develop a prototype to market car data in a blockchain

HP Enterprise (HPE) is working in conjunction with the R3 and Audi companies to commercialize data from automotive sensors based on blockchain, more specifically on a blockchain-as-a-service platform. The key proposal of this initiative is to make available to third parties, in a remote platform focused on the blockchain technology, various data on the operation of the vehicle that may be useful to manufacturers, dealers, or insurance companies, among others.

The prototype offers a secure transmission of the data coming from the sensors in real time, which are registered in a remote blockchain, with a modality that HPE calls Blockchain-as-service, that is to say that it requires only a subscription. This data can be paid to the owners of the vehicles through intelligent contracts.

For a manufacturer, for example, it is very valuable to have the actual operating data of their vehicles, which can serve as feedback and guidance to improve their designs. Likewise, the concessionaires could use some data of the cars to build a reliable and unalterable history of these. Similarly, in the case of a subsequent sale of the vehicle, the existence of an unalterable record of the data thereof prevents fraudulent handling to, for example, alter the odometer of the car.

HPE has implemented the prototype with an Audi Q2, with data from the rain sensor as the first use case. The core of this offer is the so-called HPC Mission Critical Blockchain or Mission Critical Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), which allows customers to perform blockchain workloads on enterprise platforms. This DLT proposal was developed by HPE together with the software company R3, whose distributed ledger technology was integrated with the HPE Integrity NonStop, the corporate range computers of that company.

Car manufacturers have been exploring various applications of blockchain technology, both in making their respective supply chains more efficient, and in innovations related to vehicles. Porsche, for example, promoted last year a first contest for entrepreneurs in the area of ​​blockchain and began, together with the winning start-up, the process of incorporating blockchain into selected models of its production line.

Ford, for its part, obtained a patent this week to put into operation a system of intelligent communication between vehicles, in which the requests are managed through the exchange of tokens.