Electrolux thinks that there’s a market for sharing your washing machine with friends, neighbours and prefect stranger apparently in a sharing scheme akin to the model used by Uber.
Somehow we don’t think it’ll catch on in the UK.
The idea of sharing your washing machine and allowing complete strangers to wash their dirty laundry in the machine in your home will be a step too far for many. Apart from the access to your home, who knows what they’ll wash in it!
In an interview with the Financial Times, Electrolux CEO Jonas Samuelson asks why he cannot apply that same idea of sharing like Uber to the laundry industry. If someone is not using his washing machine, why not let someone else use it instead? The other consumer would not have to invest to buy a washing machine, while the owner would actually be able to recover a bit of his investment.
But there’s issues with the notion which, is for the time being not a real project merely an idea.
In order to allowing booking time on the machine etc it’d have to be connected as Samelson acknowledged by stating that, ‘You would need intelligent communication in the machines,’ And as we have reported repeatedly on this website, that gives rise to serious concerns over security.
Samuelson also went on to concede that online security is still a “foundational issue”.
“If you are not able to ensure that users have full confidence in integrity in their smart homes, they just won’t accept it.”
So far our fears over lax security have not been eased any and, we’re not the only ones that are deeply concerned over the security of IoT devices.
