OnStar advertises that as a feature right now. If your car is stolen, they can remotely block the engine from starting. They say that you need a police report for that, but from a technological point of view, there’s nothing to stop someone at OnStar from doing it on a whim.
Yup. I wonder if hacker culture is stagnating or something, in the old days, I think, the guys who hacked Ma Bell systems with a phreaking whistle would be on these cars immediately.
I believe they are, but that’s the sort of thing that is heavily moderated against on this forum.
There are more visible targets.
Disabling somebody’s car is not a good prank for somebody looking to upload video - a car sitting in a driveway disabled is kind of boring, right? Looks just like a functioning car sitting in a driveway.
A more worrying security issue was/is the issue with several Hyundai and Kia models covering a period of over a decade that made it relatively easy to steal them. People around the country were taking advantage of that
The Kia issue was simply that they didn’t implement immobilizer keys well past the point where they were industry standard. Remember how cars used to be stolen with a slide hammer (to break the steering lock) and a screwdriver? Car thefts plummeted and that particular vector was plugged with immobilizer (chipped) keys, starting in the 90s. Hyundai/Kia models with keyless ignitions are unaffected. So this particular problem was a low tech as a they come.
“Computerized” isn’t the right concern here, as computers have been standard in cars for 40+ years. The concern is internet-connected cars. Encryption has gotten ubiquitous enough that some of the concerns about hacking we had 20 years ago are moot, but everyone should be concerned about modern cars being mucked with by the manufacturers. Subscriptions to roll down your windows, ads infiltrating your Hvac screen, despots controlling where you can travel. All valid worries.
Me, I’m going to turn into a complete luddite. I can keep an older car running indefinitely, and I intend to.
Sure, but that’s essentially what the old phone phreakers did and what the more unscrupulous car thieves do now.
Internet connected cars bring an additional set of worries, which do include hackers but not to the extent people think, as you note.
I was already leery but stopped considering Teslas entirely when I found out they opened up their artificial limits on range during some hurricane to allow people to more efficiently evacuate. Sure, “positive” publicity, I guess, but it was another way of saying they were artificially creating different trim levels that required no actual extra cost on their part.
At least we know the manufacturer isn’t controlled by an insane drug-addled fascist who promises to build a city on Mars by next year.
Personally, I’m happy to be driving a reliable older car that is powered by that there unfashionable stuff called “gasoline” and doesn’t communicate with anyone and doesn’t respond to anything more threatening than my keyfob.
ETA: I don’t know about other EVs, but the extent to which Teslas are constantly being reprogrammed and generally managed from the Mother Ship is something I’d find deeply disturbing.
Disabling cars would be the work of crackers, hackers would just jailbreak their cars so they cannot be remotely disabled.
Preppers anticipating natural or man-made EMP generally distrust cars being electronics-dependent at all.
Then they should prep on mechanical bikes, because there never have been non-electronics dependent cars.
Internal combustion engines are dependent on electrical systems, but electronics are another matter. Some hardcore enthusiasts keep older cars that still use carburetors.
Even the first functional cars had something like an electric ignition. I guess some prepper trying to drive around with their Model T would be affected by EMP just the same.
ETA: Diesels might still work. But then, maybe their starter batteries would be shot.
A disadvantage to being white in South Africa in 1989, I guess.
Judging from the number of them I see on the street, California must be one of the highest-volume states for Tesla cars.
True. But Musk already got all the money for all those CA Teslas. If he bricked every one tomorrow that costs him zero.
It’s not like Californians ateining up now to buy his tainted products.
Heh, park it on a hill. But even then, it’d have to be a pretty old diesel with a mechanical injection pump. The most recent of those that comes to mind that was commonly offered as a consumer product would be an early Dodge with a Cummins engine. IIRC, the mechanical pump was 1998 and earlier, but I could be wrong.
Gee, ya think?
Heck of an article (I know Electrek is anti-Tesla, but even still, it’s damning). Musk got an early start at vertical integration with Tesla, locking up a lot of US-based talent and raw materials in producing batteries and a charging infrastructure at scale. He has no such advantage with AI. OpenAI got an early start on claiming Nvidia chips, Anthropic got an earlier start on use-case with real potential (coding) and is now amassing data for that use-case that others can’t touch. And Google is potentially going to surpass them both with its own chip production and access to an inconceivable amount of data via YouTube and other sources.
What does xAI have? Twitter, which is shit, and Tesla, which also has an inconceivable amount of data but a much harder problem to solve (self-driving). That puts them in possibly a good long-term position, but evidently that’s not going to help them keep talent. And once the talent goes, all the data in the world might not help.
Don’t forget all the confidential and/or personal data he stole while running DOGE!
So much winning.
As we suspected, his antics in the runup to buying and ruining Twitter were calculated to torpedo its stock value to make his purchase cheaper.
What’s the opposite of “pump and dump”?
Dump on it, then pump.