Ford is really serious about slapping ads into their cars

Ford, the famed US-based automaker, has filed a patent application for an in-vehicle advertising system. This is yet another attempt made by the Michigan-based auto giant as it’s getting more serious about making some money by slapping ads into your car.

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently published the patent application back on August 29, 2024, but it was filed back in February 2023. In the third application of the in-vehicle ad system, Ford details how uses data about the vehicle’s destination, route, speed, and user preferences to deliver personalized ads right on the car’s display screen.

“These systems and methods may use knowledge of vehicle destination prediction to provide more relevant advertisements, for example, if a user is going grocery shopping, merchandise purchasing, etc. Such systems and methods further provide the opposite force to a user’s natural inclination to seek minimal or no ads,” Ford describes.

As the document details, the system adjusts the type and number of ads based on things like driving conditions and user preferences to keep ads relevant and avoid distractions using a controller that gathers data from in-vehicle sensors and external sources through a network.

It’s one thing to display ads on a car’s chassis or a truck’s van body, but Ford actually wants the ads to be inside the cars whether it’s safely on your windows, on the car’s display, or anywhere else. It’s perhaps the third in-vehicle advertising system that Ford has filed in recent years.

Ford-centered news publication Ford Authority has previously reported in recent years that the company filed for a system that uses the car’s camera to read billboards (2021) and displays some of the ad content on your car windows safely (2023).