Apple's highly-anticipated electric car project aka 'Project Titan' gets a major boost with the company's recent acquisition of a new patent for Advanced Car Control via iPhone.
The US Patent and Trademark Office has approved Apple's patent for the advanced vehicle access control system, which enables the user to remotely open the car doors, start or shut off the engine for a specific time interval or adjust and activate personalised car settings, among many such cool features.
The patent titled as "Accessing a vehicle using portable devices" introduces the concept of using a mobile phone to access a vehicle through transmission of an activation message including the access credentials, reports iDownloadBlog quoting Patently Apple.
The owner of the car can use temporary keys to establish a secure connection between the vehicle and his iPhone or authorise another device to remotely control his car.
"The primary portable device can additionally enable a secondary portable device to access the vehicle by transmitting the vehicle access credential to the secondary portable device," reads the excerpts of the patent.
All the associated devices including the primary device, a secondary device and the car can be linked through a short-range wireless protocol such as Bluetooth or Bluetooth LE for remote communication.
The patent is credited to Apple engineers including Stephen Chick, Jesse L. Dorogusker, Joakim Linde, Brian J. Tucker and Emily C. Schubert for their work which is part of the series comprising 55 such newly granted patents by USPTO.
