The dealers don't know about the cars at this level of detail. I had to use these questions to pry the data out of them:
1. Is this a connected car? Can I unlock it or start the engines from my smartphone?
2. Is that feature an option or is the feature part of the base model?
3. Can I get the connected feature later? Would I have to bring the car in to get something installed or can you enable them from your computer?
#3 is a really important question. Subaru (and perhaps others) ship all their cars with the hardware for connectivity, but the actual feature requires a subscription. The car is always connected to the internet, because the dealer can start your subscription remotely, but the salesmen don't understand that implication. They're thinking solely in terms of features you're getting, not what hardware the car has.
[1] It's almost impossible now to buy a new car without passive keyless entry that isn't a bottom-tier economy model, despite the well documented security problems with many of those protocols.
The Toyotas Camrys also seemed good, except I couldn't find a V6 to test drive and they didn't have Android Auto.
Just a note: I'm not super-paranoid about my car getting hacked. I didn't want a cellular modem because I know I won't use whatever features it enables, and I didn't want my car to be ransomed for a bitcoin. I didn't want passive keyless entry because it didn't seem like much of a convenience, and it weakens security against petty theft.
My criteria, in priority order:
Must haves:
* V6 engine
* No cellular modem
* No passive keyless entry (not really available anymore, so I had to drop it as a dealbreaker)
Nice to haves:
* Android Auto/Carplay
* Adaptive cruise control, etc.
Given the above, convince me I should care about how hard it is to break into passive keyless entry cars?
Once an attacker can remotely hack a single car, they can hack all cars that have an identical configuration, with little additional cost.
What happens then? Even if insurance companies could replace all affected cars simultaneously (very unlikely), they’d have to replace them with a model that isn’t affected.
Anyway, even if it isn’t autonomous, suppose a car has a smartphone app that allows you to turn on the heating before getting in. And then someone exploits that and gains control over the heating. They could then proceed to drain the batteries or the fuel tank by leaving it on over night, let’s say.
Not exactly a threat to national security, but still a major inconvenience.
I did not confuse anything. I only mentioned passive keyless entry in a footnote, as an example of an insecure technology that you can't really avoid anymore. You still have a chance to avoid "connected car" features, but in my estimation the days are numbered for that.
And do what with them? It's decently difficult to fence a single car, it's impossible to make millions of cars disappear.
Btw, the truck attack in the German market would've been a much larger scale if the truck's safety mechanism didn't trigger the emergency break.
Regardless, that Jeep hack sure proved a clusterf*ck of system design, and should be a cautionary tale.
You wouldnt buy a car that is safe- because bad security does not smell.
> They never had their car stolen and if they did, their insurance would have replaced it.
You'll be a fun thicket convincing your insurance your car was hacked. Especially if it turns out to be true. Nobody has rulebooks for that one yet.
If you have really good insurance, perhaps you'd end up driving a loaner for a few months.
I don't really care if you care or not, it's your car, but I care.
Also, the issue with passive keyless entry isn't just theft of the car itself, its more often theft of its contents. It makes break-ins much easier to do undetected.
From my personal experience, the service departments will happily download data from your car and sell it to the highest bidder. My case was simple: the dealer updated the mileage record in Carfax using the odometer reading from my warranty-provided oil change. The car is leased, so I'm 99% sure I had no way to opt-out.
Sounds innocent, but my insurance company was watching. They extrapolated the mileage and decided I would cross the 7,500 mi/yr threshold - which triggered a premium hike. Funny thing - I didn't exceed 7,500 miles that year, but they already have my money now.
What else could a dealer read off your non-internet connected car when you bring it in?
This is just my own unorthodox methodology. Your mileage may vary.
(The best transmission shop I even saw.)
This trend of doing everything over the Internet for no good reason other than business model is growing from just ridiculous and user-hostile into something that's actually dangerous to people's lives.
Thus it is going to be hard to avoid a network connected car and it seems likely that network will be the Internet.
Well, I agree that maps as a second source of information can be important for autonomous vehicles. However, I don't understand why "map" would imply "network connected". Offline navigation systems with detailed maps have existed and still exist for more than twenty years now. I fear that the "offline autonomous vehicle" will solely fail to manifest because of business decisions (online being "more convenient" for both the end-user and the company), not because of technical limitations.
Edit: which is to say, maps aren't really secondary parts of current systems but more like "co-primary" parts. The cars aren't planning identify traffic lights where they don't expect them.
"Almost all of the fully autonomous vehicles currently allowed on public roads are still under the direct supervision of human pilots, and they’re only driving on roads that have been heavily studied and mapped in three dimensions."
See:
https://www.consumerreports.org/autonomous-driving/self-driv...
or "Cars will only be able to drive themselves if they have access to high-precision maps. The digital material contained in today’s navigation systems is not enough. To be able to drive itself safely, a car needs to know its position on the road down to the centimetre. "
https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/next/connecti...
Comma.ai, on the other hand, feeds their AI the camera feed and the sensor signals from the car, and it responds, as far as I know, almost entirely based on that stimulus. Of course, Comma.ai's car is presumably less predictable, it relies on a black box to "think", but you could feed it the general concept of what path to take from A to B, even a set of waypoint GPS coordinates of where to turn, and hypothetically, such a car could navigate to that destination otherwise offline, or with the grade of maps reasonably available offline. It's intended to drive like a human drives: Based on the information it perceives in the world around it.
When a dashboard GPS is out of date, it's irritating. When your car's autonav system is out of date, your car is useless.
Specifically, look in the article:
>First allow me to address what I think won't work:
>Trying to air gap autonomous devices.
For the purposes of outside knowledge queries you might not be able to come up with in advance, there's good cause to outsource those rare requests out to the Internet: Just do it intelligently. Require a prefix instruction for an outside request.
For instance, I went ahead and implement Wolfram's API for knowledge queries. They have a great "spoken answer" endpoint, which replies with a string meant to be piped straight to speech output. So I "ask wolfram how tall abraham lincoln was", my program hands everything AFTER "ask wolfram" to the Wolfram API, and Wolfram's API gives me a string back with exactly what I asked.
Now sure, I'm not entirely offline at that point, but everything regarding my personal data, home automation devices, etc. is under my control, and any time I reach out, it's specifically using a command authorizing it to do so.
Of course, caveats before you think my project sounds impressive: A. It's written in Visual Basic. B. Speech recognition isn't working (yet).
Visual Basic is a fine programming language with very weird syntax. Hell, Microsoft has put out .NET bindings for CNTK so you could even use that.
And a few thousdand died on September 11th, nearly 20 years ago. The collective fear from that made the world a far worse place than the actual death toll. If there's a terrorist attack that targets internet connected cars, what do you think the collective reaction might be?
I contend that 40 years from now our grandchildren will be astounded that we got into such dangerous vehicles before self-driving cars.
[1] - I'm being facetious, of course.
It's fortunate that terrorists are both very incompetent and very low in number. How else do you explain the fact that there's been exactly 1 very serious and successful foreign terror attack on US soil (the highest value target in the world) in the past 50-ish years?
Currently there's the very possible opportunity of a power grid/infrastructure attack that could kill tens of thousands. But nobody should be truly worried about it.
Terrorists just aren't that good at what they do. Why would they somehow be better at hacking cars than they are at anything else?
The Oklahoma bomber killed 168, for example. The first one that came to my mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States
Most news organizations report on foreign and domestic terror differently. When the average American thinks of a terrorist it isn't a white guy with a U-Haul.
If that happens, car crashes aren't the problem - it's the widespread famine that follows in a week's time.
- Live in the country and get really good at repairing standard transmission cars and dodging emissions inspections, or
- Live in the city and get really good at dodging in general (it's a city, you'll learn that skill anyhow)
I thought that the article taught me nothing new at all, but then realized it did: it taught me how little the issue is understood by the regulators.
I'd say that an attack like that is just a matter of time, if I didn't think that a mass-destruction scenario that leads to a legislative change wouldn't happen sooner due to a bug.
Are you comfortable with sharing your reasons? I feel similarly but do not have concrete plans quite yet.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/01/15/resea...