[hunson_abadeer]

There's a lot of people remarking about this not being novel or the grant being too high, but I'd make two other critiques.

First, what happens if the electrical characteristics of your vehicle change in some way? New vs old battery? Busted headlight? Phone plugged into an outlet? Diesel air intake heater grid kicking in on a cold day? What if you need to jumpstart your vehicle? It just seems so finicky in the real world.

Second, what's the point of using this analog signaling system to begin with? I don't see the supposed simplicity of it. Both the transmitter and the receiver are more complex than would be needed for digital. The other argument is that it is somehow more "hacker-proof", but using analog signals doesn't make it so. You can have a similar scheme operating on the CAN bus with no added risk. In fact, I bet there are devices on the CAN bus that can both measure and modulate battery drain, so the isolation may be illusory.

Ultimately, it's not about not having the technology. It's just that your average customer favors convenience features over having a fortress on wheels. Plus, the returns on sophisticated defenses are diminishing, given that a car can always be loaded onto a tow truck, the hood can be popped open, or the whole thing can be stripped for parts with a Sawzall (as catalytic converter thieves tend to do).

[function_seven]

This is a two part system. There's the relay under the hood, and a keypad plugged into the cigarette lighter port. When you put the correct code in, the device will induce the voltage fluctuations that tell the under-hood relay to close.

I think the whole "flip on wipers, flash high-beams twice, turn on map light" thing is a fallback for when you don't have the keypad or don't want it to always be plugged in. If the voltage variances for those actions changes, I suppose you can retrain it with the keypad plugged in.

And the point of that analog signalling is to make installation easy. You just plug the keypad into the lighter port. It handles the rest.

[hunson_abadeer]

Right, but that voltage modulation scheme can be distorted by the changing electrical characteristics of your car. Again, imagine a diesel heater kicking in, or windshield wipers, or some other variable load (phone charging)... you can have a clever fault-tolerant modulation scheme, but probably not if you want to also support "blink headlights" as a backup input method?

Beyond that, I don't see the "simplicity" argument for analog. You're already messing with the vehicle's wiring. CAN bus is easily accessible from the passenger compartment. Or, running an extra data wire takes 10 minutes. Short-range RF can be easily secured in this application too.

Plus, on many newer cars, USB charging ports are displacing 12 V outlets, so it's not even all that future-proof.

It's not that I'm desperate to dislike this design, but I'm struggling to see the qualitative improvement over a billion aftermarket designs that most people just kinda don't use...