Mini USA recently began a pilot program in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and San Francisco that gives current Mini Cooper owners a personalized message as they pass by a digital billboard. Owners in the pilot program fill out a questionnaire giving Mini USA non-personal information that will then be programmed into their fob. Based on the information they submitted, when they approach the billboard the RFID will activate a personalized greeting that is displayed on the billboard.
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) appears to be a topic of debate between those who don’t mind convenience and those who view it as just another way for Big Brother to track us. Mini Cooper’s pilot program of RFID tags in their cars for further personalization are hailed by some as just another fun feature of being a Mini owner, which is the whole branding and marketing aspect of Mini USA, a subsidiary of BMW. Current and potential Mini owners worry that it could eventually be used for other methods to track and collect data on its owners unsuspectingly, such as what Sony BMG did when they installed anti-piracy software into some of their CD’s that also caused PC instability allowing for viruses and spyware to corrupt the user’s computer.
However, as technology moves forward, what Mini is doing in regards to RFID’s is becoming relatively common, such as cell phones, GPS, EZ Pass, Nike+iPod and so on. I think the pilot program, aptly named Motorby, will be a hit and we will soon see it become a feature of all Mini Cooper’s expanding into a city near you. What will be interesting is to see if this Mini perk will cause unwanted distraction on our highways thus causing accidents and/or if Mini Cooper’s sales are driven upward when Motorby becomes the next “it” of the car industry.
What do you think?
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