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Comment by PLG88 | Hacker News Reader

One can only hope that it's these sort of events which slowly pushes to having more legislation and responsibility to the provider of digital services (i.e., Honda) if things go wrong (e.g., goods inside or even vehicle stolen).

While I am 99% sure the politicians will write crappy legislation, over time it should become better and ensure that the purveyor of compromised SW is responsible for their sloppy work. It took decades but seatbelts, crash tests etc etc made us all massively safer when driving and we probably need the same minimum across some digital services.

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One thing.

The system can auto correct.

For example, one person claims that such a vulnerability means that the insurance company won't pay, for it leaves no smashed windows if you are robbed.

However, all it takes is one person going to court, publicizing it enough, and winning against the insurance company.

What happens? The insurance company, naturally, starts to increase rates for owners of that brand of car.

It has to pay out more often, for that car has a weakness, and this is the result.

This has happened before, with cars that didn't have physical steering wheel ignition locks, back in the 80s.

The result? Sales dropped for those cars, no one wants to pay 50% more for insurance, and manufacturers quickly worked to fix the issue.

It's a sad thing though, to see a relentless stare at the daily, short term bottom line, without thought to other factors, and long term profit.

Way to drive away customers, and crash a reputation! Brands to steer clear of, to be sure!

This effect only helps future car buyers, it doesn’t make the owners of vulnerable vehicles any safer or compensate them in any way.

Of course not. It is not like car makers retrofitted old cars with physical ignition locks on the 80s, either.

I wonder, would this also be a physical retrofit? There could be hardware limitations to change here.

It would even decrease the value of their property to no fault of their own. That sounds like something the manufacturer should be responsible for.

>The result? Sales dropped for those cars, no one wants to pay 50% more for insurance, and manufacturers quickly worked to fix the issue.

In all cases the margins were razor thin. Poorly equipped cars were stolen marginally more and likewise cost a trivial amount more to insure.

But personal new car buying is 500% driven by consumers using emotion driven logic to magnify tiny differences so sales dropped, somewhat, maybe. It's hard to separate this from the variable of older products and cheaper products generally selling less well than the new hotness. Column locks went on to become standard as OEMs refreshed product lines and did mid-life facelifts.

I recall raised insurance rates, amd stragglers catching up due to those rates in the 80s.

And just waving it all away with "No, people just buy shiny" is counter to volvo even existing as it did. Many people do not buy just shiny.

Same thing happened when EMV was first rolled out. There was replay attack fraud, but the cardholder was blamed for it. But once you get enough complaints, it forces insurance and gov oversight into action as you describe. Article from Brian Krebs on EMV implementation issues back in 2014 timeframe for example: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2012/09/researchers-chip-and-pin...

How is a car a digital service? Is this system using some type of software? Sure, but that doesn’t make it a digital service.

Also, where do you live that businesses selling goods to you are not liable if they don’t work as expected? This is not a software problem, the problem here is that a key doesn’t work as expected. The fact that it may “have software” somewhere doesn’t make the problem go away.

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