It’s Monday morning, work awaits, and two realities exist: the reality where you drive an old-fashioned car that’s basically a tin can on sticks and knobs hobbled together like a downhill soapbox racer… then, there’s the reality where you have the latest-model car with onboard, in-car payments. As you can imagine, these two drives to work will be nothing alike, so take a little trip with us in the car with the cool stuff.

You get up early, get ready, and slide into your sleek car… futuristic dashboard shining in the dim of the garage, dinging coming from everywhere. You reach toward your car’s infotainment system, launch “in-car payments”, map your route, pay your tolls, breakfast, parking fees, and hit the road. On your way there, you zip right through the toll lanes, slip through the drive-through, and glide into your parking spot… you never touched a card or an app once, ever.

While this was only a dramatic recreation… you get the picture. We sure wouldn’t mind it being our reality, so we looked for folks trying to make it happen. Car IQ fit the bill… they created an in-car payment network so you can leave your card at home. It’s neat because the car itself is what connects directly to merchants to complete transactions. Payments automatically initiate and can be used for many things.

Earlier this year, they tacked onto Series B funding with an additional $15 million in funds, and saw interest from investors like Circle K, Visa, Navistar, and Bridgestone. That paints an interesting picture… maybe one day your autonomous EV drives itself to the Bridgestone service station, buys its own tires, has them installed, pays, recharges itself, picks up a pizza for dinner from Circle K, then heads home. We think it’s not an impossible future.

Car IQ already makes it possible for the car to pay for its own fuel and services… in addition to those mentioned above, there was participation from Avanta Ventures, TELUS Ventures, and State Farm Ventures. We can imagine the possibilities, and they seem many and fertile. Founded in 2016, the company has been catapulted by the new form of machine identity verification they created. And they’re already in stations like Shell.

Some think that in-car payments is the way all cars will go eventually, that makes sense. Right off the bat, we’re making transactions more secure because we’re cutting out all the middlemen. That means less points of possible failure along the way between your payment and the merchant… less hands passing the information around means less ways for the bad guys to get to it.

Mercedes thinks so and has decided to incorporate in-vehicle payments. As Mercedes goes, so go the others? Well… the trends are telling us that, globally, the number of connected cars is set for substantial growth in the next few years. As these cars come online, they’ll need to be able to do more than get us from here to there, they’ll need to be able to talk to all the other smart things around them, especially to pay for stuff.

Mercedes-Benz Financial Services recently made the announcement about in-car payments powered by Mercedes pay, calling the addition of the capability a transformation of the car from a simple car into a payment device. It reminds us of the point when our flip phones all the sudden became “smart” phones and our ID, wallet… and what sometimes feels like everything else, all in one. Maybe we’re there now with cars.

There are larger trends at play that really interest us about in-car payments, and they have to do with timing. We’re seeing a marked growth in the popularity of drive-up and small format restaurants (more on that in future issues), and we can see in-car payments showing up just in time for these two to marry and create a beautiful new space where they can live in harmony… creating us value.

So, the way we see it, there could come a day soon where you’ll order your groceries via voice in the car on your way to the store, you pull up and the car pays, a concierge brings your groceries to your trunk, and you head home… all this right after Timmy’s big basketball game. One less thing you have to do with a van full of hungry basketball players. Come back next week, we’ll have more from the IPO space.