It’s a great system until you return to your car – or, I should say, where your car should have been, but isn’t, because hackers have hacked your code and stolen your car.
It doesn’t happen often, but often enough to be of concern
No system is perfect, but I prefer “smart” physical keys that require both a traditional key and an embedded sensor. With the right key but without the sensor, the ignition will turn and the car will start, but will quickly become immobilized.
Risks everywhere. That particular relay attack is about 10 years old now. I don’t know how current the risk is. Fobs may have gotten smarter about broadcasting an identity before they’ve “heard” your car.
Critically, that attack depends on being able to associate a particular car with a particular fob location. Given the short ranges involved between fob and thief #1 and also between car and thief #2, it becomes a guessing game.
e.g. #1 is wandering around inside a restaurant while #2 is wandering around the parking lot. Maybe they get lucky and both are near a matched pair of fob and car simultaneously. Maybe not.
It’d be lots more productive for them to try to snag cars from in front of homes where the location of the fob (inside that same house) is not a guessing game.
Can it happen? Sure. Does it happen often enough for any one of us to alter our behavior? Not that I can see.
Would an insurer love to scare every single one of their customers into taking massive, inconvenient, and expensive precautions if there’s even a chance it will stop a single theft claim? Of course they would. It’s the economic equivalent of spam. That article could have been scaring customers for probably 10+ years at near-zero cost to the insurer.
Agreed, of course they would.
But how about when law enforcement takes the same position?
Even more pedantic Chevrolet owner : MILs GM keys had the ISUZO logo on them
It also depends how far back you go. IIRC early mid 1960s the keys were different for each GM division. Mid 1970s? All the same.
Rant warning (tech over-complications).
My new-ish truck has a rotary shift knob on the dash instead of the traditional lever. Since there is no physical connection to the trans, and no tactile feedback, software governs a lot of the decisions.
Due to the lack of visual cues, it’s easy for a driver to exit without realizing the truck is not in “Park”. So it attempts to discern whether a driver is actually present, and if not, overrides the knob’s position and commands “AutoPark”.
As you’d expect, this isn’t perfect. Last week while going through the car wash, it got alarmed and decided to fling itself into Park while moving down the line. This caused the conveyor to stop while shoving the truck forward, and then shut down the whole wash line, complete with alarms. Thankfully I completed the sequence to reset it to Neutral before the workers restarted the line.
It seems to have occurred while I was shifting around on the seat, trying to put my wallet in my back pocket. I’m guessing it sensed “Seat belt released”->“No weight on seat”->“In Neutral”->“Vehicle rolling forward”, and assumed I’d abandoned ship and it needed to trigger an emergency stop.
Thankfully we finally got away from those obvious and easy to use levers… you know, the one’s on the column with detents and an obvious pointer to the gear? We are so fortunate now to have spiffy and decorative knobs that are the exact same tactile feel and shape as the radio and A/C knobs. Because it’s much more important to look neato and cool than to have safe and familiar functionality. And if Stellantis sacrifices a lot of people and even a beloved Star Trek actor to their fashion-driven gear selectors, it’s just the price we have to pay for shiny things, right? /s
Quotes from the link above (bolding mine):
Unlike traditional gear selectors which shift forwards and backwards, the units in the 2015 Jeep that killed Yelchin operate electronically, sending a signal to the vehicle’s transmission and returning to a center rest position. This can make it confusing for drivers used to traditional gear selectors to tell right away whether the vehicle is in park, neutral, or reverse.
…hundreds of crashes and dozens of injuries are also associated with the vehicle. Injuries from the defective Jeep Grand Cherokees include crushed pelvises, broken ribs, ruptured bladder, bone fractures, and internal organ damage.
I don’t know how much of this is law-firm histrionics, or how many of the injuries are due to the “shiny new shifters”, but I’d sure like to spend some quality time (with a cat ‘o’ nine-tails) explaining my position to the moronic dipshits who came up with this abomination.
I will point out that a great many other vehicles with what vaguely resemble shift knobs or levers aren’t really anything but oversized switches connected to the computer too.
Just because you move the knob to position X doesn’t mean the transmission will follow. Just because you see the knob in position X doesn’t mean the transmission is actually in state X.
In the interest of preventing runaway cars that roll over drivers some new regulations demand cars become aggressively “smart” about ensuring the vehicle can’t be easily left in neutral and can’t engage forward or reverse with a door open or nobody in the seat. All of which practically demands the human shift control is just a suggestion to a computer guarding the inputs to prevent the dangerous situation.
We may not like it, and we may rant about it, but it’s here to stay.
My gripe against modern automotive controls: it’s really hard to press a button on a touch screen while the vehicle is bumping and bouncing about.
I have to spend more time than necessary to aim my finger at whatever button I want.
Thankfully my truck is older, so it has a relatively small touch screen and there is a bezel that I can use to anchor my thumb as I reach for some control button. I can’t imagine driving a vehicle that has a big featureless expanse of touch screen.
And they probably make them just as unresponsive and laggy as those kiosk touchscreens at fast food joints (which I surely must have ranted about earlier)
good call on that, but the problem is an american invention and older than I am…
;–)
(ok, one could argue the case that it did not catch on 70 years ago … )
I used to belong to a gym, long ago enough that cars didn’t yet have GPS. When you walked in was the check-in desk on the left side, followed by treadmills. On the right side was a peg board with hooks to hang your keys. If one was on one of the first treadmills you had direct line of sight to the key board. If you saw someone walk in & hang their keys you could walk over, knowing you probably had at least ½ hour, grab their keys, walk outside, press the button, listen for the chirp & get in & drive off. I’m sure when the owner went back & didn’t see their keys their first thought wouldn’t be to go outside & see their car missing but to assume that they put their keys there last time & go check out the machines that they used assuming that they left them somewhere in the gym, buying the car thief even more time to get away.
I went to the hardware store & bought a chipless key that would only un/lock the doors & put the ignition in ‘Accessory’ position so one could use the windows & radio but not start it. I figured no one is going to attempt to steal if they have to put the key in every car door to see if it’ll unlock (hardware store key so it didn’t even have the manufacturer’s logo on it.
Yup. I believe they are a significant cause of distracted driving if you need to look down to change the radio, or turn on/off certain functions rather than just do it by feel if you had buttons. Manufacturers like them because they’re cheaper & easier to build. Adding a button on a UI is easy compared to a physical layout. It’s one of the main reasons I will never get a Tesla, too.