Imagining the future of automotive biometrics

Unlocking your phone with fingerprint or facial recognition is commonplace and people are used to it. The next frontier for biometrics is cars.

You probably want your car to know who you are; after all, it's both convenient and safe.

Imagine this: When you get in, the car verifies who you are and personalizes it to your preferences, with the temperature, radio channels, and seat position all adjusted to familiar settings.

There's also other technology to keep you safe, like heart rate monitors and seatbelt sensors that call emergency services if you're having a heart attack.

Of course, the role of this type of technology is not just a simple alarm for accidents, and there is still a lot of room for improvement. And people's demand for more convenient and safer cars has already emerged.

However, there are many different options for incorporating biometric sensors into cars, each with its own pros and cons.

Consumers are already accustomed to using fingerprint scanning on their phones, so this could be an easy transition to automotive products. In addition, fingerprint sensors can be added to vehicles after they are manufactured, making them very useful for rental car companies and car-sharing platforms.

On the downside, fingerprint scanning requires specialized hardware and active driver participation, which can be difficult while driving. In addition, removing gloves to unlock a vehicle in the cold winter is not a comfortable thing, and sensors covered in ice or rain may not recognize fingerprint information.

When it comes to renting a car, there’s also the question of whether mysophobes would be willing to put their fingers on a scanner that has been touched by hundreds of other people.

Meanwhile, another biometric technology — facial recognition — has a lot of room to grow.

Because facial recognition is a more passive authentication method, its advantages are obvious. It does not require the driver to do anything special. As long as the driver sits in the driver's seat, the car can recognize who it is.

The safety benefits are also quite amazing.

In 2018, Hyundai's luxury brand Genesis announced that it had developed a concept car that uses facial recognition technology to identify the driver, personalize the interior settings, and even improve safety by monitoring driver fatigue.

The importance of this type of feature is that when the vehicle knows you are becoming drowsy, it can guide you to the nearest rest area or even sense changes in your mood, reducing the risk of road accidents.

This creates a more positive user experience for manufacturers while reducing hardware costs.

A more practical use of facial recognition in car-sharing is to prevent car thefts from repeat offenders or vandalism. Providers can create a watch list of known thieves and prevent them from driving, or send an alert to headquarters.

Alternatively, a car thief or teenager could use someone else's ID to gain access to a vehicle, but the sensors would recognize their face and report that to the car-sharing or rental company, or to the authorities.

Of course, some consumers remain skeptical of facial recognition and worry about privacy issues, but those concerns are waning.

In a 2018 survey of adults in the United States, Asia, and Europe, IBM found that 67% were comfortable with using biometric technology, and a whopping 87% felt they would get used to it in the future.

Although there is no 100% guarantee that we are heading in the right direction, it is not a bad thing for facial recognition to win in automotive applications as things stand.

But don’t rush; cars equipped with this technology will start arriving in the coming years and will likely include features designed primarily for safety and a personalized driving experience.

If you want to achieve seamless travel, such as paying tolls and ordering at drive-thru restaurants, etc., all by "face scanning", it will take a longer time to become mainstream.