Engineering students at the University of Saskatchewan have developed a prototype that works in conjunction with your cellphones text message capabilities and your cars computer system.
What is this for exactly? Well if your car is ever stolen for some reason, all you have to do is send a text and it’ll be relayed to your car and start to shut it down. One of the developers, Michael Siourounis said “you text your vehicle and inform it that it has been stolen. It will actually initiate a sequence of events that causes the car’s internal computers, that we don’t modify at all, to think that the car has overheated.”
Shae Pederson, another developer said that the car actually goes into limited power mode and “we have it set for 30 seconds… you can only go about 30 kilometres an hour, and basically you are running on half the cylinders in your car. That 30 seconds gives them the time, the thief or whoever, time to pull over. And then after that it will shut the car down right away.”
The device is still currently a prototype and costs $600. Once the car is shut down, Siourounis said the “onboard GPS unit on our device texts you back the location of the vehicle. So then you can send the police to go recover it or go get it yourself.”
I’m sure if you got an Escalade, Bentley or live in the Jane & Finch area in Toronto the $600 is worth the expense.
Via: CBC
