Car maker Jaguar Land Rover is testing smart wallet technology that lets drivers earn cryptocurrency and make payments on the move.
Drivers can earn credits by choosing to let their cars automatically report useful road condition data such as traffic congestion or potholes to navigation providers or local authorities.
These credits can then be redeemed for rewards such as coffee or to automatically pay tolls, parking fees and electric vehicle charging.
Jaguar Land Rover teamed up with the IOTA Foundation to harness distributed ledger technologies for the new smart wallet system, eliminating transaction fees.
Russell Vickers, software architect, Jaguar Land Rover, says: "In the future an autonomous car could drive itself to a charging station, recharge and pay, while its owner could choose to participate in the sharing economy - earning rewards from sharing useful data such as warning other cars of traffic jams."