Behind-the-scenes with the world’s first contactless car

Contactless payment is taking the world by storm. Whether you’re using an Oyster card to tap on to a London bus, your bank card to pay for groceries or your smartphone to buy a skinny mocha choca latte, we’ve quickly become a ‘tap to buy’ society.

In fact, we’ve embraced the technology so readily that few people carry cash anymore. This is proving problematic for charity volunteers, who stand at train stations and on high streets with buckets in an attempt to raise funds.

Hyundai has teamed up with the Stand up to Cancer charity to pair charitable donations with contactless technology in a fun way.

The South Korean car manufacturer has hooked up contactless pads to the exterior of an Ioniq electric car to encourage the public to raise funds. Starting May 22 at London’s King’s Cross station, the car will be visiting public spaces and Hyundai dealerships for special fundraising events.

We were invited to the Hyundai Academy near the company’s UK headquarters in High Wycombe to see the finishing touches being applied to the car ahead of its UK-wide tour.

Sat in the middle of the warehouse is a vibrant Ioniq, wrapped in a 50 shades of orange checkerboard design. On each door and on both sides of the front and rear bumper is a white pad with the now-familiar contactless symbol. The front and rear number plate is replaced by a constantly updating ‘totaliser’.

The idea is that those who wish to donate £5 can quickly tap the bumper-mounted pads. However, those who donate £10 can jump behind the wheel, where a dash-mounted tablet will take a photograph of the charitable person.

It’s immediately printed and a small photo drops from a chute between the rear seats. Each image is a sticker that can be placed on the car, with the goal to have the car completely covered in selfies by the end of the tour.

The whole process is run by a Raspberry Pi – essentially a mini programmable computer – which sits in the boot. When someone donates, the hazard warning lights flash and the totaliser immediately updates.

With pretty much everything controlled through the boot-mounted computer, it means that Hyundai’s team can experiment with different donation values and track their performance to optimise the number of donations.

And to further incentivise people to tap the car, everyone who donates can enter into a competition to win an electric Ioniq.

Hyundai’s ball-park fund-raising goal for the project is somewhere in the region of a quarter of a million pounds. However, the team admits that it’s such a new and unique way to raise money that they’re not sure how well it will perform.

Having tested the process, we can say it’s certainly more fun and engaging than chucking pennies in a bucket. And with contactless technology now so common, we wouldn’t be surprised to see people pleased to find an alternative, more modern way to donate and embrace the contactless car with open wallets.