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Britain's largest car manufacturer has said that it is testing a system that will allow drivers to be paid in cryptocurrency in exchange for sharing their data with the company.

As reported by Reuters, the company will install a smart wallet in every car. The driver would then be payed with the IOTA cryptocurrency whenever the vehicle automatically reported useful information, such as traffic congestion and pothole locations, which would then be fed to navigation services or the local authorities.

Drivers could also get cryptocurrency if they enroll their car in a ride-sharing program too, Jaguar said, as part of its target for a "zero emissions, zero accidents, and zero congestion" world.

While IOTA is similar to Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency has been described specifically as a coin for Internet of Things (IoT) transactions. Moreover, while Bitcoin is managed by a blockchain architecture, IOTA instead uses a new platform called Tangle that reportedly helps it avoid some of the issues Bitcoin faces, such as network delays due to block congestion and slow verification of transactions.

“The smart wallet technology ... can be easily adapted into all new vehicles,” Dominik Schiener, IOTA co-founder and co-chairman of its board, said. “IOTA wants to enable interoperability with all these different players. So there is no Jaguar coin, no BMW coin, but one universal token for this machine economy,”

While it's unclear whether drivers will be able to extract the cryptocurrency or convert it into pounds, Jaguar says the tokens could be used to pay for tolls, parking and charging for electric cars.

We may have to wait some time before the technology reaches the public, however. For the moment, the technology is only available at a Jaguar Land Rover software engineering base in Ireland. Engineers have reportedly equipped several vehicles with the wallet already, including the Jaguar F-PACE and Range Rover Velar.

The company does not have a set date for when the smart wallet will be commercially available.