Hacker News Reader

Comment by HPsquared | Hacker News Reader

Old basic cars are easier to own, and harder to pwn.

> and harder to pwn

All it takes to pwn a Volkswagen T4 from the mid-90s is to rake the lock, pry open or smash the door, and then about half a minute to hot-wire three pins on the ignition switch (one for the main power and one for the starter motor), although I think that you should be able to motor-rake the ignition switch as well.

Source: owned and heavily worked on one for a few years. Reliable as fuck but thank god Europe doesn't have much of a "joyride" scene.

That’s why everyone has now installed a hidden fuel pump kill switch in their T4s. At least in the US

Depends how old. Anything before mid 90s was trivial to steal with little or no equipment.

true, there's got to be out there some car, recent enough to not be stolen easily and old enough not to have all that hyper connectivity IoT bs

2005

2000-2005 is the sweet spot. Cars had immobilizers but not keyless entry. Basic electronics: airbags, electric windows, radio. Engines were naturally aspirated with port injection.

62 fairlane, I'd welcome the attempt. If they somehow manage to both prime the fuel pump and trick the carb into introducing enough fuel into the engine to get it to start before the battery's stone dead I'd pay a princely sum for live video of them trying to figure out where first gear is while getting a rude introduction to purely mechanical steering. Given what I paid for it, I could have 6-10 of it stolen before I'm in the neighborhood of sticker on a "cheap" new car.

Doesn't take much equipment to steal it, though.

And column shifters still exist- hell, even the Tesla Model 3 has one- so any gen z kid who knows how a manual transmission works can shift it into gear.

I am quite certain that getting this vehicle started and out of it's parking space is fraught in ways that beggar belief for anyone who hasn't spent a significant portion of their life dealing with the vagaries of shitty vintage project cars, and even then this one's got several tricks up her sleeve that the initiated won't see coming. Think three on the tree, on the floor, with more than one wildly out of place barrier preventing straightforward movement through the shift pattern. Getting this thing in first is less like shifting a car and more like picking an oldschool lock with ward plates. Then there's the combination of dodgy battery and mulish fuel delivery system to contend with. The only person I've ever met who can consistently get this thing to crank cold is the lunatic that chopped out the aftermarket electric fuel pump and replaced it with an OEM mechanical pump out of sheer perversity. Equipment? Hell I could leave the key in the ignition and a sign in a window DARING someone to try and I still like my odds.

The cutoff is at modern infotainment systems. If you still have a car stereo, you're probably good.

Really? Mechanical steering column locks were common by the late 70s, right? I'm not aware of any "trivial" bypass, especially not without tools.

Screwdriver. Many of them have sheared pins such that the lock doesn't engage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com