GM can manage an EV's batteries wirelessly and remotely | Hacker News Reader

GM can manage an EV's batteries wirelessly and remotely

spectrum.ieee.org

50 pointsclouddrover27 comments

I see a lot of people complaining about why this is pointless but the much more worrying thing for me is what happens when you suddenly "subscribe" to your car and if you haven't made you GM payment well then sorry you won't be driving anywhere until you pay plus a $20 late fee plus a $30 accelerated processing thing.

Beyond even that lets imagine a CCTV catches a crime runs an ML scan of all the people in the city it hits your face with a 83% match, better then any one else. Boom the Department of Automated Crime Prevention uses the government mandated kill switch that is required to be available in every vehicle. When you finally find out why your car doesn't work you find out you can't get it reactivated until the following Monday because it is 5:45 on a Friday afternoon and the government offices are now closed.

People are begging to go under a gestapo regime that tracks and monitors everything like 1984. Its amazing

> Unlike today’s battery modules, which link up to an on-board management system through a tangle of orange wiring, GM’s system features RF antennas integrated on circuit boards. The antennas allow the transfer of data via a 2.4-gigahertz wireless protocol similar to Bluetooth but with lower power. Slave modules report back to an onboard master, sending measurements of cell voltages and other data. That onboard master can also talk through the cloud to GM.

I can understand why GM wants batteries to report their health to the cloud, but can anyone explain why they want wireless networking for in-car components?

I know Elon Musk bragged for a while about reducing the amount of wiring that was going into the model Y (AFAICT, that didn't end up happening, or it was very poorly communicated) as a sort of manufacturing advantage to decrease labor costs. Perhaps that is the rationale?

That just seems like a poor reason to reduce the reliability of component communications in the car.

The article claims the specific benefits at the end. I'm assuming the main benefit is that eliminating the wiring simplifies manufacturing.

They do appear to be taking BEVs seriously. I just wish we could get more detailed information on what they're doing exactly without having to tease it out of a puff piece that bizarrely conflates the vehicle talking to servers over mobile internet with bluetooth like communication between internal parts.

"The eco-friendly approach eliminates about a kilogram per vehicle, as well as three meters of wiring. Jettisoning nearly 90 percent of pack wiring ekes out another advantage: Throughout the industry, wired battery connectors demand enough physical clearance for human techs to squeeze two fingers inside. Eliminating the wiring and touchpoints carves out room to stuff more batteries into a given space, with a lower-profile design. Which leaves plenty of room for a thumbs-up. "

It's probably just an unrelated research project. The "reason" you'd want it is to save money on wire harness construction and installation. The reason you don't do foolish things like this is poor reliability. How many five year old BMWs and Mercs don't have something wrong with their CAN bus peripheral lighting.

One other possible reason is to severely hamper any third party service or parts market from forming around this part of the car, and in particular, their IP.

I think that has less to do with the wiring itself and more to do with the amount of things that need to be wired at this point. What protocol and phy is used for connectivity won't change this. At least maybe wireless can be PTP and not deal with the issue CAN has when one of the links in the chain goes offline.

There might be a small reliability advantage over wired comms, since you'd only need to run the main battery cables (much larger/sturdier than comms wiring). Overall it sounds more like just something that someone thought sounded cool, though. "Our batteries use nanotech" "Yeah? Well OUR batteries are WIRELESS!"

> “You can have one central warehouse monitoring all these devices,” says Fiona Meyer-Teruel, GM’s lead engineer for battery system electronics

How could this possibly go wrong?

Why is it that you can't get a car that hasn't had BS click bate "features" added for marketing purposes that inevitably make the vehicle less reliable and in most cases does nothing beneficial. How on earth does having radio communication between components in a vehicle that could end up in all types of radio environment make sense. What are the benefits? It's slower, prone to interference and certainly prone to malicious interference... Who hasn't experienced interference to the bluetooth connection between phone and audio system whilst driving?

What happened to the good old days when special features was chrome and whitewalls.... Ah I'm getting old, get off my grass..

Maybe your travel can be restricted wirelessly? I bet governments salivate over this.

But wireless charging would be awesome. Just charge at any parking lot without doing anything.

What happened to TVs, phones, fridges, ... ?

The level of marketing fluff in TFA is just unbearable.

They’re acting like this is somehow better than what Tesla has simply because it’s wireless? I don’t get the point.

   Unlike today’s battery modules, which link up to an on-board management system through a tangle of orange wiring, GM’s system features RF antennas integrated on circuit boards. The antennas allow the transfer of data via a 2.4-gigahertz wireless protocol similar to Bluetooth but with lower power. Slave modules report back to an onboard master, sending measurements of cell voltages and other data.  That onboard master can also talk through the cloud to GM.

They're trying really hard to make this sound like an improvement, but it's really not. Wiring is not going to be visible in the car - and it's going to be much more foolproof. What if someone turns on an RF jammer in the car next to you on the highway? Surely you still need wires for critical systems even if you run some stuff wirelessly.

That sounds... worse?

We took a reliable wired connection between two pieces that never move relative to each other, and replaced it with a wireless one!

What could go wrong?

This means the police and military can, too, with the right demands to GM.

(And, in the right circumstances, perhaps other militaries as well.)

Remote disablement of physical infrastructure, with due process recourse for misuse weeks, months, or years after-the-fact, truly terrifies me. This is basic health and safety stuff.

I simply don’t trust the rule of law enough in the Five Eyes anymore to assume these things won’t eventually be abused by the state.

This does not at first glance seem exceptionally better than what Tesla can presumably do with their vehicle telemetry.

You are right. This article doesn’t really say anything except that this version is wireless, and Tesla’s is wired. Why should I, as a consumer, care?

Well, with this new system every battery cell becomes another device that needs to be secured from remote attack and receive periodic security updates until the manufacturer decides they can't be bothered anymore. From that standpoint, it's worse than the hard-wired systems they replace which worked fine.

The problem with wirelessly controlled cars is that there is no instructions on how to disable it.

People seem worried about the connection being wireless on this battery. As far as I can tell from the article, the only consequence of a connectivity loss is: GM gets less data. It doesn't seem consequential to the consumer.

> Software and battery nodes can be reprogrammed over-the-air. With that in mind, the system was designed with end-to-end encryption to prevent hacking.

Forget about connectivity loss, the worst case here is the ability for an attacker to remotely turn your battery into a bomb. End-to-end encryption does not come close to covering all possible attack vectors.

Even then the wireless connection is only between batteries and vehicle. The vehicle's central BMS has a cloud connection but that's a separate issue.

Does this mean that battery levels reported to the driver could fluctuate and be inaccurate when there is interference?

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