Automotive giants BMW and Ford have taken another step in developing a means to tackle used car fraud by recording the provenance and history of vehicles using blockchain technology.

• Announced Tuesday, a working group formed under the Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative (MOBI) and co-chaired by the two car giants, has released the second installment of a standard for how to record the "true" identity of vehicles on a blockchain platform.
• Dubbed vehicle "birth certificates," the Vehicle Identity Standards I and II focus on vehicle registration and maintenance traceability in order to provide a "tamper-proof" history of the vehicle to buyers, regulators and insurers.
• “Vehicle registration on blockchain allows formerly disconnected vehicle registration systems between states and countries to connect using a secure, shared, and trusted ledger," said the working group.
• MOBI COO and co-founder Tram Vo said a network based on the standards could "open up trillions of dollars of new opportunities to monetize vehicles, services, data and infrastructure."
• The work is supported by a number of other major firms including Accenture, AWS, Bosch, Hitachi America, Honda and IBM.

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