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Comment by neuralRiot | Hacker News Reader

Call me old but what is so great about the smart key? Not having to pull it out of your pocket? I know this is an old rant already but car have reached the crappyfication curve, when something cannot improve its main purpose anymore it starts adding unneeded features to be able to push a “new” product.

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The keys this article is talking about aren't (necessarily) keys you don't have to "Pull out of your pocket". What's "smart" about them is that the car's immobilizer technology talks to them before agreeing to let the vehicle be driven.

Hence the article says thieves would be able to "hot wire" a car after using this attack. You can't (if manufacturer's did their job properly) "hot wire" modern cars like you see in a movies, the computer overseeing things doesn't let it be driven anywhere just because somebody jammed a screwdriver in a hole and taped some wires together.

Keyless entry and keyless ignition are entirely different technologies that have a different problem (relay attacks) which has been covered a long time ago and has numerous quite different solutions from this.

This article is about the all-to-common situation where somebody cut too many corners and left themselves open to a pretty easy cryptographic vulnerability. (Some) Car manufacturers did a crap job of making the "smart" key that disables the immobilizer actually secure, and bad guys can use that to clone such a key and drive off in your car. If they didn't also copy the mechanical shape of the key (which would be more effort) they can smash the lock just as they would have in the 1980s to steal a car. Some of them might even remember stealing cars in the 1980s and not need to learn a new technique.

Mechanical keys with transponders are even easier to clone but their range is very short (the transponder has to be literally inside the antenna) so a distant attack is almost impossible, smart keys on the other hand have the same range as the remote, its only limited by the range of the transmitter in the vehicle, if you touch the door and amplify that signal and the keys are close enough to pick it up, it will answer by unlocking the doors.

The smart key is literally the best feature in the second hand Lexus I picked up a few years ago.

I no longer have to pry the key out of my jeans, or go looking for it in all my bags when I’m travelling.

my favorite use case is when I've left my key in my bag that I've popped into the trunk and closed. my car beeps at me and my trunk pops right open. it's saved me more than once when I've been far away from home.

I disagree, when you’ve got 4 kids and both arms full of groceries, when the doors open automatically or even unlock on their own it’s a godsend. I’d even say it’s probably saved some lives as the kids race to get in and out of the parking lot instead of waiting on me to shuffle around for the keys, dropping bags in the process, and then chasing each other around in blind traffic.

How much of an inconvenience would it be if your car gets stolen having 4 kids and both arms full of groceries in contrast to placing the bags on the floor for a second?

I have this smart key thingy too and I keep it in one of those RFID pouches. Since I don't have to use the key to start the engine, I feel the whole thing became more of a problem than it was before. You at least always knew where the key is and where to put it. Now it sometimes slids down the seat, or is in my jacket that I wanted to leave in the car or the engine/electric is not on/off because pushing the button does several things. It became an inconvenience and the few times I really used the automatic open feature after deliberately taking out the key out of the pouch to profit from it are negligible.

> when you’ve got 4 arms arms full of groceries

Damnit, speaking of unwanted features...

Isn't the solution to that situation a shopping cart?

you dont have children

I find this behavior from parents very condescending - "You don't have children therefore your argument is invalid". Parenting isn't that hard - I have 2 kids (8 and 5 years age) and we're just doing fine. Just like 7 billion other people on this planet whose parents went through the same. Of all the hard things I've done in my 42 years of life, raising kids doesn't rank in the top 10.

Survivorship Bias? /s :)

I have 3 kids around the same ages. I wouldn't say they're the hardest thing in life but they're often a very difficult variable to manage along with life's other challenges. They have this compounding effect...

I'm not saying dealing with the kids is at all easy. But the kids are there either way. So I think you have my argument exactly backwards. I'm not saying something is easy. I think kids plus carried bags sounds completely overwhelming. If you want to say I'm wrong, you're making the argument that kids plus carried bags is easier than I think. So please, elaborate on how that's easier than a cart.

You're basically saying "I cannot, in any way, imagine a situation where the parent's story is the sensible choice, and therefore I'm entitled to make a pedantic comment about a situation I wasn't in". Instead, you should give them the benefit of the doubt.

I didn't say it was wrong. I said a cart should make it easier. I'm legitimately confused by their partial explanation, not being pedantic. It's fair to want clarification about why a cart doesn't solve this.

Maybe there are no carts at this store for some awful reason. Maybe the story was so focused on how this type of key solved their problem that they didn't give a fair shake to other possible solutions. More information is needed.

There are multiple ways I can/do give benefit of the doubt, but doing so doesn't make the situation any clearer.

Not always possible (weather conditions, snow can be a problem with those), and even with a cart you still have four kids to keep an eye on.

> Not always possible (weather conditions, snow can be a problem with those)

I have a hard time imagining snow such that you can walk to a car with four kids while carrying bags, but can't push a cart.

> even with a cart you still have four kids to keep an eye on.

I would posit that kids + cart + grabbing keys is basically always preferable to kids + both arms full of bags + not grabbing keys.

I'm with you and not a good representative of the target market for keyless fobs. slovette and aetherspawn give good use cases for some benefits. I still ask how much of a real-world problem to be solved was sticking a physical key into a steering column? What were the stated goals for developing NFC ignition fobs en re drivers, manufacturers, and the automotive industry?(1)

Apart from inevitable consequences like from this article, are benefits outweighing other intended, unintended, and inevitable consequences like these for most people?

  - Forgetting car keys more often per new learned behaviors
  - Fob batteries dying 
  - Replacing lost / broken fobs is more costly in time, money, and hassle 
  - Leaving fobs in the car more often

(1) Understood keyless entry / alarm / remote starting are clear benefits

> Leaving fobs in the car more often

OTOH, it's much harder to leave a key in the car when you never have to take it out of your pocket in the first place.

Now i find the opposite situation happening and more difficult/ expensive to solve, that is leaving the keys outside the car and driving away without them.

I doubt you have driven a car with these types of keys if you claim this happens.

If you have, I’d ask you to name it explicitly because I have yet to drive one (out of 10+ be driven) that does not visually and audibly scream at you that the key is not in the vehicle. That’s if it will even let you shift out of park (in a non-manual).

I locked my keys in the car a few times and had to call for help when I had a mechanical key. This has never happened to me with the fob. When I closed the fob in the car, the car refused to lock and made a very long annoying beep at me until I retrieved the fob.

Today’s it’s mostly smart keys. Tomorrow it will all be driven from your phone. I can’t wait when I never have to carry a key again. This is a stepping stone.

You want a car that stops working when your phone battery dies?

Of course it will be fail open. The car will unlock when it does not detect the correct cell phone nearby.

It doesn't work that way. iPhones NFC chips are still powered even if the phone battery dies. That's how transit cards work even when the battery is dead.

https://bgr.com/2018/09/18/iphone-xs-vs-iphone-xr-nfc-chip-w...

That's better than nothing, but that doesn't describe "NFC works with dead phone", that describes "phone reserves up to five hours of emergency battery power for only NFC use".

When my current car fob starts displaying a low battery warning I have at minimum weeks to replace the battery. (Not to mention my current car fob is resistant to being dropped, stepped on, etc.)

Then carry a key fob with you. Nobody will stop you.

well Tesla model 3 can be unlocked with your phone and the key is no bigger than a credit card so it is the best of both worlds for me.

Now Ford lets you in your car with a pin code on some and there are suggestions you may be able to start their Mach E EV with just a pin as well.

Not having the key scratch your smartphone, for one. For another, it just reduces the steps to get you from point A to point B. All these little things add up.

Keys shouldn't be hard enough to scratch phone glass.

yes, they should not be harder than a 5 on the mohs scale. as we all know, phone glass scratches at a level 6, with deeper grooves at a level 7

The scratches on my iPhone disagree

They're definitely from keys? And what kind of metal does the key seem to be?

Definitely from keys. Very light scratches, but they are there. No idea which key exactly, I have a handful on my keychain.

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