Hacker News Reader

For now. Like web pages used to work if you disabled JavaScript.

This is different. Cars could potentially be driven far away from civilization, so their reliability is sometimes critical for their occupants' survival. A car can't disable itself and leave people stranded in the middle of nowhere just because it doesn't have a cellular signal to phone home.

And btw, many web pages do still work if you disable js. I'm saying that as someone who routinely disables js for websites that abuse it.

Unfortunately, that situation has already happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20873234

That was at least a carsharing car. It's a well-known fact that these need connectivity (your only means of unlocking them is the app, after all) and have a severely limited area where you could drive them. Though that one time when I took a carsharing car 70 km away from the city where it apparently couldn't communicate (but my phone had LTE) it didn't disable itself, it just didn't lock when the app thought it did. So it does depend on the particular way the particular company implemented its remote control unit I guess?

I'm talking more about the situation where it's your own car.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com