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Car DNA
Apprehend Inorganic Criminals | |
When a car hits something, it often leaves some paint behind. I have come out to find mysterious paint scrapes on my car once or twice, with no note or other explanation of what happened. More serious are hit and run collisions, where the paint left behind is sometimes used to narrow down the make
and model of the responsible car.
DNA fingerprinting is now commonly used as physical evidence to apprehend criminals, and some areas collect DNA on everyone arrested, building up a library for future use. Why not put DNA in car paint? It is very tough and persists for years in the environment. It would be very simple to put together an inidividual identifier for each car - one would use a mix of one or more DNA "letters", each letter being a 50 nucleotide stretch. More letters could be introduced as needed. The letters would be premade and an individual mix sprayed on the final coat of paint. Records would link the DNA tag to the car serial number. Paint left on the scene would undergo DNA fingerprinting just as blood and hair does now.
Chips in License Plates
http://www.halfbake..._20license_20plates
This idea got me thinking about hit and run accidents. [bungston, Oct 05 2004, last modified Oct 17 2004]
Spray-on DataDot identification
http://www.datadotd...gy_ourtechs_dot.htm
Making this compulsory for new cars has been toyed with locally [Adze, Sep 16 2005]
[link]
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DNA is reasonable stable, but on the surface of a car exposed to high temperatures, salt spray, UV light etc. it won't last very long. Anyway you wouldn't be allowed to sell a car like that in Europe. They don't like genetically modified cars there. |
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The manufacturers could still put some additive into the paint (marked fibers like in counterfeit proof paper?). The additive could encode manufacturer, model, year to cut down the number of suspects. |
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God forbid some bacteria on the car surface absorbs this. |
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Current paint analysis lets investigators hone in on make and year of car just with a few scrapes. |
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Methinks taking a production line and mixing a custom, DNA-encoded paint for each car would add a lot of expense to each car. Would you pay, maybe $1000.00 more for a car with this feature? |
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[CP] DNA wouldn't work (see earlier note), but little flitters of holographic metal foil would be cheap. Not cheap enough to tag each car individually because of the way the painting process is set up, but cheap enough for model and year. It would cost pennies per car and make the paint analysis much cheaper. |
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I heard something recently about a way to make small RFID tags that were sprayed onto the underside of a car to identify it. |
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I think your best bet with this plan would be to use some kind of chemical marker or the holographic foil like kbecker said. You could have a few letters that identify the make and model like //VW BTL// or print part of the VIN. |
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