Future Ford Vehicles Could Alert Drivers About Illegal Drugs

Ford Motor Company has filed a patent for an unknown cargo detection and evidence collection system that may be used on future Ford vehicles, Ford Authority has learned.

The patent was filed on March 17^th, 2023, published on September 19^th, 2024, and assigned serial number 0308426.

The Ford Authority Take

Ford has filed a number of patents that introduce various ways future vehicles may detect all sorts of things inside the cabin – whether that be tracking devices or smartphones placed there for nefarious reasons, hidden cameras, or various items people may leave behind in rideshare vehicles. Now, this newly published patent introduces another, similar idea, but this time, it’s for an unknown cargo detection and evidence collection system that may be used on future Ford vehicles – one used to detect things such as illegal drugs planted in a vehicle without the owner’s knowledge.

The motivation behind this particular idea stems from the large amount of illegal drugs that crosses the U.S. and Mexico border on a regular basis, much of which is brought over by folks that are known as “mules” and are well aware of the fact that they’re committing a crime. However, drug cartels have also been known to place illegal drugs in the vehicles of people that routinely cross the border for work or other normal reasons, making them what is typically referred to as “blind mules.” Problem is, if those folks are stopped at the border and the drugs are discovered, they could wind up in legal hot water even though they didn’t do anything wrong.

In recent years, there have been many cases of blind mules that were imprisoned but later found innocent of this crime, but Ford proposes this system as a way of preventing that from happening in the first place. This system would use sensors to determine when cargo is added to the vehicle – such as underneath it or in the wheels – and if that’s the case, it would present the user with a warning message – perhaps preventing them from becoming unwilling drug mules.