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Comment by flukus | Hacker News Reader

You think the features of car touchscreens will still be relevant in 5 years? The point them in because it adds planned obsolescence.

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I really don't think it's planned obsolescence - it's just that automotive entertainment systems are subject to the same amount of testing as everything else in the car, which means your average media system is 5 years behind. I have a 2005 Land Rover Discovery 3 with a touch screen, and at 11 years old, it still works the same as on the day I bought it. That's what you want. Software and hardware which continues working fine for more than a decade.

On the other end of the scale we have Tesla, which clearly does very little testing of their media systems, and pushes updates over the air, so things get broken or changed with every update. But "hey, it's not a big deal, we'll just push another update in a month!" - that's absolutely not acceptable with cars.

For example: https://medium.com/@michaelmeier_90534/tesla-model-s-is-grea...

I would be absolutely furious if my car did this. I would rather have a shitty system that stays shitty for the lifetime of the car, than have a good system that gets broken through an over-the-air update.

I agree the tesla system is pretty bad, but software needs to be updatable. How many exploits do you think your 2005 land rover has?

Does it really matter if the vehicle is not connected to the Internet in any way?

I mean, if an attacker has physical access to the insides of your car, all bets are off and is now his vehicle.

They might not have the internet (although some do via various methods) but most will have Bluetooth which could kill the console in the best case. There has been cases of people getting access to things like the door locks and the brake system.

Remember it's not just the internet that makes you susceptible, it's any network.

The issue is that an attacker could gain access to the inside of your car only briefly, but leave a device that continues carrying out the exploit

And do what exactly? make the car crash? If you want to do that just cut a break fluid line, don't even need to open the car for that.

I mean, I take your general point, but I'm almost certain that 99.9% of people breaking into cars do it to steal them, not to install a virus that will track your location or make your car crash. Both of those can be achieved trivially without even opening the car.

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