That Car You are Driving Could be Tagged

Filed in archive Tags and Readers on October 28, 2004

Recently I had breakfast with a gentleman who had worked for years in the manufacturing automation and controls industry. (Ohio, where I live, is a center for the controls industry.)

We got to talking about radio frequency, and he described how he had worked in RFID "before it was fashionable" back in the 1980's. We somehow got on the subject of item level tagging and the privacy uproar over it, and he laughed and told me this story:

Even back in the 1980's the auto manufacturers used RFID in their manufacturing systems. A tag "as large as your hand" would be affixed to an automobile chassis on the assembly line. The tag contained data directing the manufacturing robots which color paint to use, for example, as the car body traveled down the line. The use of RFID in this way was actually common and many of the largest auto manufacturers used RFID in their factory processes. (see as an example, this RFID application)

I asked him if the tags were removed once the car was ready for delivery. He looked at me, puzzled, and asked "why would anyone bother removing them?"

The upshot is, your car may have an RFID tag on it. Right now.

[Note: I'd be interested to hear from anyone working in the automotive or controls industry about current-day practices. Is this still the case?]