IDEA: Car2Car messaging via license plate OCR

[huttj]

I've always wanted to be able to say things to other drivers, such as "Thanks for letting me merge," or, "You can pull out into the intersection when turning left." Unfortunately, rolling down my window and yelling at them really isn't viable, most of the time.

The ideal solution would be like a walkie-talkie -- press a button to say something. Of course, the routing alone would be nuts, and most drivers wouldn't have a receiver, to begin with.

A much simpler implementation might be to use license plates to route messages in a private way. A dash-mounted cell phone would grab the plate number when you tap a "chat" button, and then you could say something to the driver. If they have the app, they could hear it right away, via a TTS message ("The driver of a white civic says..."). If they don't have the app, the message would be stored and they would get a one-time snail mail message notifying them of the service, and how to register. Then, they could log in and listen to their messages.

I'll readily admit that there are issues (e.g., creep factor, fiddling with phones on the road), but I think most of them are already issues, and aren't going to be significantly affected by this app (i.e., creepers gonna creep).

Questions

• If you would use this app, please let me know! I think it would be fun to build. Would you pay for it? What aspects would you pay for (e.g., long-term message storage, dash cam video storage, report bad driver feature).
• If you would not use this app, I'd also like to know. Particularly, I'm interested in the why.
• If you have any feature ideas, or complications that I didn't mention, please let me know.

[huttj]

http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2010-09/social-networking-site-uses-license-plates-connect-drivers

[huttj]

http://www.bump.com/

[huttj]

http://www.blinkrapp.com/