Where is the requirement (or even a good reason) that a vehicle be connected to the internet?
Which is the same question to be asked about ovens, toilets and a raft of other stuff too.
I'd say "none."
There are plenty of reasons. Whether or not they are good depends on your opinion, but for me at least good reasons include:
* Triggering my home alarm if someone interferes with the car while it's parked in my driveway.
* Remote tracking/disabling if stolen. Not actually that useful directly but if most cars have this then fewer people will steal them.
* Automatically notifying emergency services in the event of an accident (you could argue this doesn't need internet, but 5G is IP based).
* Being able to get OTA software updates.
* Being able to listen to Spotify and use Google Maps for navigation.
* "Smart insurance". Not everyone's cup of tea, but regular insurance for me is £100+/month, so being able to cut this by 50% by remotely verifying that I drive like an old lady is a pretty good deal to me.
My car is old enough not to have an internet uplink, so instead I have an aftermarket head unit and an OBS-II 4G dongle thing. Obviously it doesn't do all of the above, but it's useful nonetheless.
Why should that require the Internet? An analog radio can do exactly that.
>* Remote tracking/disabling if stolen. Not actually that useful directly but if most cars have this then fewer people will steal them.
This is the worst reason. As we've seen, this has led to disabling of cars on the highway by auto finance companies.
What's more, no software that actually controls the operation of a vehicle should be remotely accessible -- to anyone.
>* Automatically notifying emergency services in the event of an accident (you could argue this doesn't need internet, but 5G is IP based).
That's not a bad idea. But why should something like that be linked to the driving/operation software?
>* Being able to get OTA software updates.
That's the worst idea. No software in a vehicle should allow remote updates. That's a disaster waitiing to happen.
>* Being able to listen to Spotify and use Google Maps for navigation.
Why should such functionality even be linked to the operational software of a vehicle (self-driving or otherwise)?
> An analog radio can do exactly that.
An analogue radio can do anything that an internet connection or digital radio does, but it's sort of redundant to reimplement all the functionality that modern IP gives you just because you don't like the internet.
In particular, my alarm doesn't have any programmable analogue radio, so I'd presumably need some sort of module to interface with my alarm or to change my alarm for one that supports the analogue radio that the car alarm uses. With the internet-based approach, I have a little script that reads my car's API and triggers my home's alarm with its API.
I can also do things like sending me a push notification on my phone if something happens to my car when it's parked in a public car park.
Also, analogue radios aren't necessarily safe either. In most cases, digital technology has better encryption as it's easier to implement. In the UK, signal amplification attacks are becoming an increasingly common way to steal cars, which obviously wouldn't be possible using an internet-backhaul. Digital also tends to use less power and is less prone to interference.
> no software that actually controls the operation of a vehicle should be remotely accessible -- to anyone.
Remote disabling of cars in operation is obviously not good. However, MOST cars implement lockouts by having it so if you turn them off they can't be turned on again, which is a lot safer - and works more like an immobiliser which is a well proven technology. Both this and immobilisers sometimes have faults, but it's probably one of the least likely things to cause a fatal accident on a car.
> But why should something like that be linked to the driving/operation software?
Well I wasn't arguing strictly for linking to driving software, just reasons to connect a car to the internet. But I think the reason these systems have a connection to the operational software is to detect what's actually happened to the car - has the airbag gone off, what was the speed of the impact, what do the sensors say, etc. I don't believe there is any intent that they can control the car, but as soon as you link anything digitally there's always the possibility.
> That's the worst idea.
For most people, it's a great thing. I'm not sure there's ever been an attack caused by a remote update system in a car, but at least in computers, remote auto-update has been one of the best things for security and stability in the last few decades. There are a ton of theoretical issues with it, but in practice the benefits outweigh them.
Imagine your car's fly-by-wire software is discovered to have an unintentional acceleration bug. Remote updates means everyone's car is patched immediately. Traditional updates mean maybe if you bother taking it in for your annual service to an official dealer, it might get patched if they remember. You might be one of the 0.001% who would put it on a USB pen and patch it yourself or obey a recall, but almost nobody else would bother.
Who says I don't like the Internet?
Quite the opposite, in fact. But not all communication should be done via that network of inter-connected networks.
No wireless (and in some cases, even wired) communication can ever be completely secure.
When there's a device (in this case a vehicle) that can cause injury, death, destruction and/or other mayhem, taking steps to ensure that it can't be controlled remotely, as long as humans are in the mix, is a necessity not a burden.
You may be happy to put your life in the hands of a script kiddie maliciously updating your vehicle's operating software, but I'm not.
Sure, there are many conveniences associated with allowing remote access to vehicles. But when I get behind the wheel (or potentially in a passenger seat of a self-driving vehicle), my top priority is not to die.
Allowing arbitrary connections to a device that can kill me contradicts that priority.
My cell phone can do most of those things in my current car, and also has 0 ability to steer me off a cliff.
If you're running them as a taxi service (which I think all the major self-driving companies except Tesla are), you need a way to get stats on the fleet and to direct a car to go pick someone up.
As of now, taxi services seem to be the focus of the self-driving industry because the LIDAR hardware (among a couple other things) is too pricey for consumers to justify owning. That's going to require some way to communicate with the cars. Cellular data seems a reasonable way to do that. I don't see a remarkable advantage over building their own boutique network of transmitters just to say they aren't technically on the internet.
Maybe in your vehicle. But certainly never in mine.
Any vehicle whose software can be remotely modified is one I'll never buy.
As I said, that's a disaster waiting to happen.
What? To install nightly builds? I think not.
I wouldn't put software into production (or even beta) that required weekly updates. And that's just for software to make a website or other app go, with no risk of injury or death.
Why would anyone want to be driven around in a vehicle by software that's so buggy it needs weekly updates?
How often do you update the firmware in production systems? And a commercial self-driving car definitely needs to be production quality, no?