Ford seeks patent to repossess a car remotely — by locking owners out of their cars & cutting off AC & forcing car’s audio system to ’emit an incessant & unpleasant sound’

Ford F, -0.76%, which last year derived about 6% of its $158 billion revenue from lending unit Ford Credit, said through a spokesperson it has no intention of rolling out the system anytime soon.

There’s no denying, however, that rising interest rates, higher car prices, lengthier and higher car payments, and rising repossession rates are part of what make patents like these imaginable.

‘Additional level of discomfort’

The patent described steps to trigger if an owner ignores overdue notices, starting with those meant to cause “an additional level of discomfort to a driver and occupants of the vehicle” by disabling nice-to-have features like air conditioner, remote key fobs, and the automated door lock-and-unlock system.

Another step described in the remote-repo patent application included prompting the car’s audio system to “emit an incessant and unpleasant sound every time the owner is present in the vehicle.”

The repo system would control various ways “to make the sound unpleasant,” and ensure that the owner could not “turn it off without first making contact with the lending institution.”

Final steps could include a complete lockout, and if that still doesn’t work, a 1916 invention — the tow truck — would be called remotely. The vehicle could be prompted to move and park itself in a better spot for the tow truck.

A future fully autonomous vehicle could dispense with all that and drive itself to the repo yard, or to the junkyard if the system calculates that repo costs exceed the value of the car.

As dystopian as it may seem, the Ford patent application does offer the thought that perhaps some of its last-resort measures, such as the lockout, could happen on weekends only, or allow for limited use of the vehicle within of a geofenced area not far from the owner’s home.