madd0.com

Starting with the 2010 Focus Coupés, Ford will be providing its new MyKey technology as a standard feature. Later it will also be added to other models as a standard, too.

MyKeys will allow car owners to automatically limit radio volume and top speed as well as to configure speed and safety-belt alerts—surprisingly, it is especially targeted to parents with new teenage drivers. Limits and alerts should make driving safer, lower insurance fees and gas expenses, while still allowing new drivers to practice, which is also extremely important to develop the right reflexes.

It wasn’t clear from what I read though, just how modular the system is, e.g. can one key be associated to a profile that only has alarms and no limits?

I just hope that this extremely useful technology can be adopted by other manufacturers, since it’s simply based on coded keys that are widely used. In other words, I hope that some stupid patent (or worse, some greedy patent owner) doesn’t prevent other implementations of this technology to prosper.

More details on Ford’s press release.