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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

For me, the big news is that they’re providing an adapter for their old cars.

Can I use the adapter with a non-ford EV? How long until third party ones or jailbreaks exist?

Maybe… the big problem is that they said it’s going to be using fords tech stack and app so I imagine there will be some communication from the car to the charger to regulate the charging speed as not all super chargers have the magic dock upgrade that allows them to ”talk” with third party cars properly or even start without the app. That adapter maybe be doing some of that work which could make it harder to reverse engineer as you’ll still need something to auth and start charging at non magic dock chargers.

I'm hoping the dongle speaks CCS over the CCS port. Otherwise, I'd guess Ford would have to push firmware updates or something to old cars.

So, then it's just a matter of authentication. Assuming the auth goes with the dongle and not the car, then it's probably somewhat easy (and also legal) to spoof the authentication between dongle and car, since there's no hardware owned by a third party on that link.

If it's passing plug & charge credentials from the Ford vehicle through to Tesla, then I'd guess it'd be harder.

Tesla’s charger knows the car that is charging, they can ban individual cars from the network. I don’t think a jailbreak of the adapter will get around the authentication.

But, does it know the adapter, or does it know the car?

If it just knows the adapter, how does the adapter know what car it is talking to? Assuming I can buy the adapter, then I can physically tamper with it, so now we're in the realm of mod chips, etc. If video game consoles are any indication, it'll be a matter of weeks before someone hacks the dongle.

I'd assume they have something more like a smart card (credit card, EMV) chip inside.

Hackers are not modding credit cards to change the account.

I’d imagine it works a fair bit like plug and charge.

The adapter (directly or indirectly) reports the car serial number and then Tesla would just say “No”.

It’s also possible that the adapter doesn’t do much besides the physical, and a software update in the Ford handles the rest. At which point it would be 100% useless to non-Ford vehicles.

I would like to see these stations be regulated as common carriers. They should not be allowed to collect PID (like VINs). They should not be allowed to refuse to charge a car. They should not be allowed to use any proprietary protocols. Any compliant car should be able to participate.

Imagine if gas stations could ask for a VIN and make decisions based on it.

Moreover, the ability for Teslas to supercharge is vehicle-side. In order to disable Supercharge capability on a Tesla, they reach into the car and turn it off. Strange no one's filed a CFAA suit against Tesla, but I don't own one and thus don't have standing.

It knows the car. The adapters will probably just be small dumb adapters directly wiring all the pins properly. The car itself is doing the plug and charge negotiation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_15118

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