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Comment by smolder | Hacker News Reader

Not mine, because I'm not willing to be part of the cohort of people who find out how bad of a problem insecure tech in connected cars can be for us. We are going to make mistakes before people learn, and I'll be driving an older unconnected car.

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Car related issues are never “someone else” ’s problem though.

Cars getting hacked when running around you won’t be a risk you can ignore. Your town’s critical services car systems getting compromised won’t be something you turn a blind eye to either.

As usual, apart from engaging in local committees there is little we can do from the outside, but we’ll definitely be the ones paying the price at the end.

The biggest threat to you in your car is a crash, and driving an older car from an era with lower crash standards is a far bigger risk than connectivity.

Do you honestly believe Tesla's safety hype? All modern cars are very safe. If you crash head-on with a Ford explorer, then nothing will save you.

> Do you honestly believe Tesla's safety hype?

Not sure where anyone mentioned anything to do with Tesla?

> All modern cars are very safe.

Well yeah that was my point - cars that aren't as modern aren't as safe. They increase crash standards at places like NCAP every few years.

Modern cars are optimized for good scores on NCAP, and higher NCAP score does not necessarily mean safer car.

You are correct, and here's a citation for your assertion: https://danluu.com/car-safety/ .

That's fine, I know how to drive and maintain vehicles. Crash safety has been pretty great since the 00s, especially if you shop for it.

Good thing you're the only person driving on the road isn't it?

I've been driving for almost 15 years, and never had an accident, but in that time there are many occasions where someone else on the road has done something _incredibly_ stupid. All it would have taken in any of those scenarios is for me to be opening a window/changing the radio station/looking in the rear view mirror and I'd have hit them.

> I know how to drive

Everyone thinks that they 'know how to drive'.

Even if you do, the point is other people may not know how to drive and may crash into you.

You're not the only one driving on the streets and often, other drivers are the greater danger.

about half the crashes are single vehicle accidents, and pileup drive the statistic for multicrash vehicle count, it's quite less likely being collected by a bad driver than flat stat would imply.

That stats you wrote don't disprove the above statement. You still have half crashes being multi vehicle accident, which is quite a lot.

The crash event being pileup does not changes anything.

multicar crash happens 1/cars times, duh, they account for the same fatalities but you are far less likely to be in one, because they are tied to exceptional events (i.e. snow) and non uniform across the population.

Snow is not exceptional event. Nor is rain.

And while multi car crashes happen less often, they involve more cars, so if don't affect you chance to not get into one.

The new crash safety features that actually prevent crashes are a step up from what was offered in the 00s.

> I know how to drive and maintain vehicles

Do others? You are but one in the massive herd

Disclaimer: My daily is from 1981

The first thing we learned in university was "more code = more crashes".

I mean a physical crash, not a code crash. Car physical crash safety standards have been shooting up for the last 20 years or so. A car from 10 years ago isn't built to withstand the same crashes - you can see this in how the builds have changed.

I know, that was the joke :(

once you correct for dui, speeding, driving tired and filter by vehicle types driving a car is pretty safe, that is, if one is not in the problem cohort one can have a pretty low risk of crashing.

Number of people killed on the roads every year due to cyber attack: 0

Number of people killed on the roads every year due to normal crashes: 1,350,000

If you're optimising to reduce risk of the former at the significant expense of increasing risk of the latter... I think you're a fool.

Number of people killed on the roads every year due to cyber attack: 0

Number of cars that should have complex, proprietary, hackable software: 0

It's a regress

> Number of people killed on the roads every year due to cyber attack: 0

How do you know this? The beauty of a cyber attack is that it can be made elusive. And the number of people killed on the roads by failing software is certainly not 0.

I think it's a super-reasonable guess that it's approximately zero. Maybe it's a thousand if you're super imaginative? I think you'd really struggle to make a serious argument that it was a bigger risk.

Remember Michael Hastings?

https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/media/wikileaks-vau...

First of all, that wasn't my claim. Second, the amount of circulating car that might be a vector for a cyberattack is so small that the 0 in the statistic could very well fall in the range of expected deaths when corrected for other factors.

I.e. if there's one vulnerable car every million 0 is what you'd expect deaths to be, not an astounding result.

This feels a bit like "The market can remain irrational longer than you can keep repairing your beat up 2004 Chrysler".

But I understand the sentiment.

I can think of quite a few ungenerous things to write. But i myself don't like newer models, but they are more economical.

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