Well we had a thread a few weeks ago and that was not a welcome comment, the poster that said they bought a older car with out all the tech was lambasted for their environmental impact
I only buy older cars, mostly for this reason. It's too bad that we have to choose between two evils on this, but we do. I choose to use older cars and drive less.
Is that true? I feel like you can buy a cheap tin can like a Toyota Yaris that considers power windows to be a major selling point and an optional upgrade, yet has the drive train of a modern econobox.
If I recall, they were referring to an SUV that got maybe 12mpg. Anyhow, what we really need is a car company that produces generic cars and parts that are easily interchangeable and replaceable for like 20 years.
This exists all over the world. Just not here. Our regulations have killed simplicity in cars. Now we could adjust the regulations to allow more of this - like 'kei trucks' would be a big win. In fact, allowing small horsepower vehicles to skip safety requirements if they operate under 25mph is a great idea, and give a pathway for registration and insurance.
instead of motorcycles which are licensed, registered and insured, i now see more electric bicycles, which actually look like motorcycles, cost as much as motorcycles, and just ride around willy nilly.
Any small time manufactuer should be allowed to produce road legal vehicles for intracity use, and be allowed to skip most regulations that are onerous. Lighting, fine, brakes fine, but does it need a reverse camera or onstar or lane departure? no probably not.
This is an issue due to bad visibility in modern vehicles due to safety constraints requiring tiny windows, giant pillars, tinted windows, high position off the ground etc.
This is definitely a thing. In our current car even the rear view mirror is difficult to use because it's looking out of such a small rear window with a head rest for the middle seat in the way.
I drive a small hatchback. The camera shows things that are not visible any other way. Even if the rear hatch was entirely transparent there are large areas that wouldn't be visible due to the rear seats.
So, no, it isn't only a "giant Canyanero hurr durr" issue
The problem started in the US as unintended consequences of trying to create cars with better MPG. In the last century the US government created a standard for how efficient vehicles need to be. At the time most people drove cars and specifically station wagons were among the most popular styles of cars. Trucks were not aspirational vehicles and were used for work only. And since work trucks often times do need a lot more power than a family hauler or at least need to be heavier/larger, the government created two different standards: one for cars and one for trucks (body on frame vehicles).
Of course manufacturers immediately saw that they could just make trucks more like cars than make cars more fuel efficient so they started putting modern interiors and such into trucks and modernizing the platforms to create SUVs. Thus the station wagon died and the SUV became the standard family vehicle for a lot of people.
I think we have plently of lessons of how badly things go when the federal government sticks its nose into anything that we can no longer call these as unintended consequences. They are very much intended
We need to stop having the government pick winners and losers, or try to influence the market in any way be favoring one thing over another
regulatory capture tells us these consequences are intended. Intended to keep out upstarts without Musk's cash to back it. There's no reason we couldn't have bespoke car manufacturers producing city-cars for a low total cost.
Do you think that anyone should be able to build a street-legal car? Regardless of how well it is manufactured and how safe it is for those inside and outside of it?
How do you view the relationship between government-owned, built, and maintained roads and private vehicle manufacturers that use those roads?
> Do you think that anyone should be able to build a street-legal car?
Yes
> Regardless of how well it is manufactured and how safe it is for those inside and outside of it?
No. Should have cat, compliant lighting that's not too brigth/dim, working brakes and suspension, ABS and some common sense (like no spikes protruding from it). You know, the stuff proper MOT inspection would fail you for anyway. And maybe pay few hundred to professional mechanic to get thru it and make sure you ain't doing something stupid and get you nice custom VIN for it.
If it is (say) 100+ production yeah probably should have some actual crash testing and rest of the compliance, but if it is one off ? Won't be worse than 20 years old F150 or someone's restored 70's/80's car and we aren't taking those off the roads.
Hmm. So it's OK for the government to dictate what features a car must have, may have, may not have, etc? And the government should also inspect these vehicles and make sure they meet the standards before allowing them on public roads?
Well, turns out you are in luck because this is all already possible in the US. Pretty much everywhere there are provisions for one-off custom vehicles and getting them inspected. Sure, the paperwork is daunting and the process isn't always easy, but it is definitely possible. See article about an engineer who registered a jet turbine powered VW bug that shot 15 foot flames out of the back of it in CA that surfaced on HN a few years ago.
But we aren't necessarily talking about one-off cars that hobbyists who care about their craft create. We are talking about Walmart popping out $1,100 golf carts without airbags because it's a "city car".
Do you think that the government not taking an action can ever result in unintended consequences?
Could the government, by taking no action, implicitly support the current "winner" because that's the status quo?
What do you think would happen to the prices of gasoline, electricity, etc. if the government stopped regulating any and all of it?
What's your view on government regulation around things like worksite safety, meat inspections and other food safety, drug safety?
Should the government prevent your neighbor from installing a radio signal jammer that prevents you from using your cell phone on your property? Or is that picking a winner/loser?
Right but in this case the actions taken were wrong, were not fixed, and still are not fixed.
Like the fact only in near future it will be legal for US cars to have adaptive lights. Or how for years [1] near every car light was same ineffective design.
Over-regulation is as dangerous as under-regulation. If car manufacturers have to squeeze fleet averages (which is on its own retarded idea, just tax every model separately ffs) for normal cars. Or how apparently 20MPG sportscar is "gas guzzler" but 15MPG SUV is not
> Over-regulation is as dangerous as under-regulation.
My point exactly. Correct regulation is correct. People who take the absolutist approach on either side of this tend to quickly run into either "now I have to learn to do my own meat inspections" or "I can't buy meat because a cow needs to be exactly 7'11" tall or it isn't legally a cow".
Governments serve a very real and necessary task of regulating markets to prevent abuse by bad actors. Bad actors seeking out loopholes and skirting regs is not an argument for less regulation but rather an argument for more regulation.
Any of the performance SUVs these days are still not doing much better than 12mpg, even if the per mpg emissions are better. I was getting 9mpg city driving with a late model biturbo v12.
So you mean like every car company ? The parts are available for at least 15 years, they are making a bank on replacement compared to margins on new cars (pre-covid)
Subarus are probably most plug and play but that's because they are small company that build same car for last 20 years... and not exactly super reliable. For example those [1] crazy bastards swapped whole manual gearbox and engine to a different model (that's auto-only) of Subaru and it even had pre-made holes for stuff that automatic gearbox car doesn't have in the first place, cos they used same subframe parts.
No, I mean a company that has generic enough parts for 20 years that a replacement part will be competitively priced and easy to replace. No more specialized tools, 2+ service hours to do a basic job, and all their service jobs have simple instructions with a video on how the customer can do it.. not put into some service manual that cost $400.
If I have to choose between a massive tech corporation being able to know exactly what I do with the car I've bought, as well as the cops begin able to retrieve the same data, and buying a 20+ year old "gas guzzler" that has manual, physical controls, non-subscription-required heated seats, an after-market backup camera...
You bet your bottom dollar I'm going for the "gas guzzler" - I hate these massive corporations more than I love the earth because they're the ones trying to force me into their ecosystem I can't back out of.
Too bad the barrier to entry for car manufacturing is so high due to the tech involved, the "back-door" deals, etc. etc. - I'm sure a cheaper company selling a well made equivalent of the GNU/CAR meme would be popular if marketed correctly.
Exactly. If they don't want us to buy the old cars, make good new cars, meaning, without all of the unnecessary and poorly implemented tech. The burden isn't on me to change and what's more, adding all the bad stuff is extra work, so they should just stop.
Margins on cars are pretty low, in single digit percentages, and only higher when you move to premium cars.
You just cannot compete as "not huge" company with other big companies making cheap cars.
They are making their money on service and replacement components, not on new economy car sales (well, pre-pandemic at least)
So you're not getting "cheaper company" nor "well made" because making something well and cheap requires that scale in the first place.
The issue is really that not that many come to dealership and want cheapest radio from the 90s in their new car. People do want at least android auto/carplay and that usually comes with whole rest of entertainment, and as we are in cheap economy car segment, well, the shit that cost few bucks in knobs also get moved to that entertainment.
A 20 year old Honda civic is hardly a gas guzzler. Under real driving conditions cars that are being sold new today have about the same emissions and fuel consumption as cars 20 years ago, with the exception of very large v8 engines and models like the The Suburban and the H2.
You can only really start talking about old cars being generally 'gas guzzlers' if you go back to the malaise era in the 70s.
isn’t there some law about trading stolen passwords?
I’m a fan of easy to type passphrases designed to spark a riot if ever read in open court since this seems to be a common pivot from the “look the other way when the user types” model I followed when I worked a help desk. We were told when I moved on to Hci research it’s unethical to collect the passwords, there’s a whole cottage industry of academics analyzing leaked data sets since they aren’t allowed to… just ask.
(I’m not Irb certified and not a professor, so I get to do whatever I want.)
Time to buy a ‘72 travelall. Can’t hack me if there’s nothing to hack. ETA: then swap in a modern engine and use megasquirt to run it instead of all this connected bullshit
Ah, megasquirt! If it wasn't for budget, and my utter inability to work with, or get to work, anything electronic (PCs are plug and play and some drivers, that doesn't count) I would have it or something similar on my '82 Rover V8 by now. Things are what they are, so dual carbs it will be until my estate figures out a way to add EFI. Good luck "hacking" something that has all of three fuses and a 15 year old JVC radio...
Does opening and starting it with nothing but screwdriver counts as "hacking" ? If so it can lmao.
> Ah, megasquirt! If it wasn't for budget, and my utter inability to work with, or get to work, anything electronic (PCs are plug and play and some drivers, that doesn't count) I would have it or something similar on my '82 Rover V8 by now.
Damn I thought that's a cheap option but I've looked at assembled ones and is near the price of Ecumaster...
I always wanted to try to use a screw driver or hot wiring it, just for the fun of it. If I break something, well, me and electrics... So I don't have the courage!
I once saw someone put a Bosch (?) EFI from a VW Golf GTI on a 3.5 Rover V8, should almost be cheap, if you onow what you do, so not for me. Either way, I can quite literally rebuild those dual Zenith carbs in the desert (don't ask...), if parts are there. So for overall reliability I take that over a cobled together EFI. At least for now, who knows what the future brings.
Ah, and to answer your question, yes, I think a screw driver counts as a hack!
Do the car manufacturers themselves also need to abuse a vulnerability to access this data that normally only the car owner has access to? Or can we trust our benevolent corporate overlords to keep this data safe on our behalf, and not abuse it, so long as "hackers" don't get it?
It really depends on how "model" is being classified.
You think of a Honda Civic as a "model". But Honda has the Civic Sedan, the Civic Sedan Si, the Civic Hatchback, and the Civic Type R. All-in-all, Honda has 13 different "models" listed on their US page. We can assume most other major manufacturers follow suit.
Then some of them may be broken down even further into more ultimately meaningless categories. Yes, the Civic Type R STX Bayonetta Dragon Hyper Ultimate Vroom Vroom edition may be a different "model", but all I see is Civic with too many fucking qualifiers.
And all of them will be using the same base infotainment package. Which isn't ultimately a big deal. You'd want some sort of consistency between your vehicles. Except when there's an issue like this. Then not one model, but every model has an issue.
Honestly hadn't even considered that factor. But yes, you're right, they do refer to it as the 2012 model, the 2013 model, etc. Each being distinct in the eyes of the manufacturer. So, from Honda, if their entire line is outfitted with the offending system for 10 years, that's 130 models just from Honda.
In a weird way, it -does- make sense from a capability standpoint, if a bit ridiculous of a marketing standpoint.
Let's go full tin-hat and say I want to see where a car has been. By looking up the plate, I can get the registration. By getting the registration I can get Year/Make/Model/Trim. Now with that I can hit a dictionary of the 'best' data provider for that vehicle.
A proper sales conversation would ask for some matrix of covered vehicles, and use that to compare to what they already have in portfolio, possibly account for volume request discounts, etc...
I really wish we could buy a new car these days without some insane infotainment system. I don't even want a screen or backup cam. I know DOT requires a backup cam, but they cause more trouble than they're worth and are there largely to compensate for the beefier pylons they also require now (less likely to get crushed if you roll, but more likely to get in an accident from reduced visibility).
I've owned or rented about four cars of different make and different software bases that would occasionally freeze up when you switch out of reverse into forward, but the cam would still be up, preventing you from accessing important car functions (and distracting the driver).
I've had to look up how to reset infotainment systems on youtube because it just wouldn't turn on at all.
There was also a report of an infotainment system which would glitch out if a radio broadcasted certain characters in their station or track info, causing it to stay stuck on that radio station, even across reboots (IIRC this was traced to an ancient js lib, I may be wrong though). How much help do you think the car manufacturer offered? It was likely asymptotic with 0.
But even if infotainment systems didn't suck for all these reasons, I still wouldn't want one. They seriously just suck ass by their very nature. Just give me a vehicle.
I don't agree that backup cameras are mandated (I may be missing some federal regulation, however). The regulations (that I've seen) provide a list rearward visibility tests that the vehicle must pass. There are no modern cars that can pass these tests without a backup camera, but I think that many sedans from the 1980s and maybe even the early 1990s could pass them without backup cameras.
I'm preparing to finally part ways with my long-suffering '94 Saturn wagon[0] and I cannot believe what we've given up in rear visibility in the last 30 years. Part of it is definitely safety (and I know how poorly my little wagon and I would fare in any crash) but I think another part of it is the high-belted, steeply sloping styling of newer cars. The Saturn has a tall greenhouse that stays tall all around with a low beltline[1], which looks irredeemably dorky compared to everything on the road today, but it's low enough to see a toddler running behind me while I'm preparing to back up. It makes me a little sad that I will probably never again have the opportunity to drive a car with visibility that good.
I'm not concerned about COPS extracting data from my car, I'm MUCH more concerned about car's OEM extracting data regularly from remote from "my" car, who is mine just formally being connected to it's OEM and who knows what others.
This is a FAR BIGGER threat even in national security terms because an unpatched vulnerability might allow acting on ALL cars in a nation, for instance blocking them in some crucial intersections paralyzing the entire traffic, or push them to consume too much all at once (EVs/plug-in hybrid) from the grid to make mass blackouts and so on.
>but they cause more trouble than they're worth and are there largely to compensate for the beefier pylons they also require now
They're a decade late knee jerk reaction to the huge rear blind spots the Ford Expeditions and Chevy Suburbans that white collar types thought were the cool hot thing to own in 2004ish and characteristically refused to take responsibility for occasionally backing over their kids with them.
The fat pillars came a tad later with side curtain airbags.
You are in the minority of drivers. Most people want updated tech in their cars, including (what I consider to be) very valuable backup cameras. I'm shocked to see this sentiment about "dumb" vehicles rising on HN.
I don't think it's that shocking to see the sentiment. People who work with computers have (IMO) a better understanding of the pitfalls that can come with their integration into systems. We are more aware of the security issues that can arise, as well as the complexity they can introduce.
I don't agree with the backup camera take (I love mine), but I otherwise generally agree with the dumb car comment. I want my vehicle to be understandable and hackable, so I can work on it without needing access to its computer as much as possible. I don't want aspects of my vehicle to be made available on the public internet. I don't want a touch screen that eliminates tactile controls.
Backup cams are mount lower and have a wider field of view than people do. They are really effective at keeping drivers from running over children. They are incredibly effective at this. Even in my low to the ground compact car, my backup cam sees things I cannot out my back window.
That's because you really are blind. There is no way to see through or around the huge pillars on modern cars. Also with more modern cars being crossovers or SUVs, your height is also an impedance to rearward visibility.
Drive a car from the 80s and 90s with a big greenhouse. The vehicle brochures back then had visibility as a feature of the car. Car reviewers who cover retro cars talk about this a lot. They are always amazed at how much you can see out of older cars.
From the article it seems the only remote hack was through a SiriusXM vulnerability. Everything else seems to involve a physical connection to the vehicle to pull the infotainment data which i'm assuming requires a court order.
Doesn’t a search of a infotainment system count as in plain sight? E.G. if you consent or they have a valid cause to search your car doesn’t the infotainment system come under that too?
Even if they can’t run full forensics might be able to just browse through the call log or recent trips.
So let me the one asking the inevitable question: short of buying a 1987 van with the environmental impact of a refinery, what are new or reasonably recent brand/models whose electronics can be hacked to the point every non essential system can be turned off, when not physically removed, without any hindrance for normal driving operations?
It really depends on your level of commitment to getting the infotainment out of the vehicle.
Most cars will have the infotainment in a CAN or flexray network with a bunch of other stuff in the cockpit.
Theoretically unless other systems are tightly integrating with the infotainment (using their GPS localization data for example) you could theoretical just snif the network through your OBD connector and find out what messages your infotainment sends (i.e. whatever messages dissapear when you power the infotainment off).
Most of the time the Body Control Module (the master of ceremonies in the cockpit) is just checking that a particular range of message IDs are being sent to 'assume' that the infotainment is 'online'. So sending those messages on the OBD port as a man-in-the-middle of sorts would theoretically keep all the other systems happy.
So I suppose it really depends on how far you are willing to go. Also I think it would be difficult to make the trim look any good after removing the central infotainment system.
You don't need a 1987 van, anything before ~2007 should qualify. For example, I own a 2006 Honda. I made the mistake of leaving the windows open several years ago before a massive downpour. As a result, virtually all of my onboard electrical systems no longer function (radio, interior dashboard lights, ect) but the actual function of the car (as far as driving is concerned) is unchanged. I shudder to think about what would happen to a "smart" car in a similar situation.
My hope is that as more "legit" EVs are scrapped due to insurance total loss decisions, their guts and parts will be heavily in demand to power EV conversions.
I lost a 2018 Bolt EV this year after my insurance company decided it wasn't worth repairing. My car might not be the perfect candidate for this, but I know there will be parts worth scavenging off of it in the next life for the carcass.
I sure hope to be able to perform one of these conversions myself in the future once the broader "swap infrastructure" and knowledge bases expand to better support individuals like myself (similar to how you can find a wealth of knowledge and aftermarket support for Honda K-series engine swaps into many cars beyond even Honda models).
I'm trying to think of what useful evidence that law enforcement can get out of an infotainment system. Guilty of listening to too many Brittney Spears tracks?
Navigation/location data, and also likely time stamped car activity data which you don’t get from the MCU.
Call data and other data from devices tethered to it, and for connected infotainment systems also wifi and cellular data which can provide a secondary source of location data in case the location history has been purged.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there are some more rich logs there including CANBUS data from other car systems on some of the newer models.
Overall if you have a late model car especially towards the upper end of the spectrum I would assume the infotainment system has about as much information as a cellphone you carry because they are basically phones stuck to the console at this point.
I assume there's certain functionality similar to the casual surveillance tools from Allstate and other insurance companies that you plug into your OBD2 port. You know, the ones that log eg GPS location, velocity/acceleration/jerk of the vehicle or its controls, VIN and associated PII metadata, etc.
I've heard tale of all sorts of data that are broadcast back to the manufacturers' servers from your car for later sale to data brokers for advertising, etc. information. Not exactly surprising to hear that that information is available if you connect to the car directly using LE tools.
The Lotus I had would datalog all kinds of data over time. It was very common for buyers to have someone do a data dump of the car's ECU to see how it was used / treated. The ECU was very much designed just to run the engine in this car (no infotainment, network upload, or any other integration), but kept some interesting long term data. That data can be very telling. It tells you percentage of time that the engine spent at each RPM, and percentage of time spent at certain speeds, percentage of time spent at various manifold pressures, maximum engine speeds at certain coolant temps, highest vehicle speeds attained, and number of full load standing starts.
This info would not be useful to LE, because they don't keep timestamps on the data. But it is a big tell to the dealership how hard you have been driving your car.
The commercial vehicles market tend to still be "stupid". Of course this limits you to full size vans, big trucks, and things like that. I suspect "smarts" will infect these as well eventually, when it's just cheaper for the manufacturer to just include them in the build even when not asked for them.
There was a recent article about Toyota still making old-school Land Cruisers that have little to no electronics[0] I don't think they can pass emissions tests in Europe or US though, which would make them unusable, if not unimportable.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] thread"I'll never buy a modern car with all the surveillance tech, just something with no electronics that I can fix myself!".
instead of motorcycles which are licensed, registered and insured, i now see more electric bicycles, which actually look like motorcycles, cost as much as motorcycles, and just ride around willy nilly.
Any small time manufactuer should be allowed to produce road legal vehicles for intracity use, and be allowed to skip most regulations that are onerous. Lighting, fine, brakes fine, but does it need a reverse camera or onstar or lane departure? no probably not.
I also doubt any market for what you're describing exists beyond "15 year old Honda Civic/Toyota Camry"
Reverse cameras are definitely helpful, if not a necessity when driving a behemoth vehicle. This is much less of a concern for a golf cart.
Works OK on a course... would not work so well on a noisy street.
US legislators just decided to not fight the "how small car needs to be to not require backup camera" and required it to be in all of them.
So, no, it isn't only a "giant Canyanero hurr durr" issue
Of course manufacturers immediately saw that they could just make trucks more like cars than make cars more fuel efficient so they started putting modern interiors and such into trucks and modernizing the platforms to create SUVs. Thus the station wagon died and the SUV became the standard family vehicle for a lot of people.
I think we have plently of lessons of how badly things go when the federal government sticks its nose into anything that we can no longer call these as unintended consequences. They are very much intended
We need to stop having the government pick winners and losers, or try to influence the market in any way be favoring one thing over another
regulatory capture tells us these consequences are intended. Intended to keep out upstarts without Musk's cash to back it. There's no reason we couldn't have bespoke car manufacturers producing city-cars for a low total cost.
How do you view the relationship between government-owned, built, and maintained roads and private vehicle manufacturers that use those roads?
Yes
> Regardless of how well it is manufactured and how safe it is for those inside and outside of it?
No. Should have cat, compliant lighting that's not too brigth/dim, working brakes and suspension, ABS and some common sense (like no spikes protruding from it). You know, the stuff proper MOT inspection would fail you for anyway. And maybe pay few hundred to professional mechanic to get thru it and make sure you ain't doing something stupid and get you nice custom VIN for it.
If it is (say) 100+ production yeah probably should have some actual crash testing and rest of the compliance, but if it is one off ? Won't be worse than 20 years old F150 or someone's restored 70's/80's car and we aren't taking those off the roads.
Well, turns out you are in luck because this is all already possible in the US. Pretty much everywhere there are provisions for one-off custom vehicles and getting them inspected. Sure, the paperwork is daunting and the process isn't always easy, but it is definitely possible. See article about an engineer who registered a jet turbine powered VW bug that shot 15 foot flames out of the back of it in CA that surfaced on HN a few years ago.
But we aren't necessarily talking about one-off cars that hobbyists who care about their craft create. We are talking about Walmart popping out $1,100 golf carts without airbags because it's a "city car".
Could the government, by taking no action, implicitly support the current "winner" because that's the status quo?
What do you think would happen to the prices of gasoline, electricity, etc. if the government stopped regulating any and all of it?
What's your view on government regulation around things like worksite safety, meat inspections and other food safety, drug safety?
Should the government prevent your neighbor from installing a radio signal jammer that prevents you from using your cell phone on your property? Or is that picking a winner/loser?
Like the fact only in near future it will be legal for US cars to have adaptive lights. Or how for years [1] near every car light was same ineffective design.
Over-regulation is as dangerous as under-regulation. If car manufacturers have to squeeze fleet averages (which is on its own retarded idea, just tax every model separately ffs) for normal cars. Or how apparently 20MPG sportscar is "gas guzzler" but 15MPG SUV is not
* [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2J91UG6Fn8
My point exactly. Correct regulation is correct. People who take the absolutist approach on either side of this tend to quickly run into either "now I have to learn to do my own meat inspections" or "I can't buy meat because a cow needs to be exactly 7'11" tall or it isn't legally a cow".
Governments serve a very real and necessary task of regulating markets to prevent abuse by bad actors. Bad actors seeking out loopholes and skirting regs is not an argument for less regulation but rather an argument for more regulation.
Subarus are probably most plug and play but that's because they are small company that build same car for last 20 years... and not exactly super reliable. For example those [1] crazy bastards swapped whole manual gearbox and engine to a different model (that's auto-only) of Subaru and it even had pre-made holes for stuff that automatic gearbox car doesn't have in the first place, cos they used same subframe parts.
* [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDcDpUaiwY4
You bet your bottom dollar I'm going for the "gas guzzler" - I hate these massive corporations more than I love the earth because they're the ones trying to force me into their ecosystem I can't back out of.
Too bad the barrier to entry for car manufacturing is so high due to the tech involved, the "back-door" deals, etc. etc. - I'm sure a cheaper company selling a well made equivalent of the GNU/CAR meme would be popular if marketed correctly.
You just cannot compete as "not huge" company with other big companies making cheap cars.
They are making their money on service and replacement components, not on new economy car sales (well, pre-pandemic at least)
So you're not getting "cheaper company" nor "well made" because making something well and cheap requires that scale in the first place.
The issue is really that not that many come to dealership and want cheapest radio from the 90s in their new car. People do want at least android auto/carplay and that usually comes with whole rest of entertainment, and as we are in cheap economy car segment, well, the shit that cost few bucks in knobs also get moved to that entertainment.
You can only really start talking about old cars being generally 'gas guzzlers' if you go back to the malaise era in the 70s.
The production of a car produces about 40k gallons of hazardous waste, removing that water permanently from the water supply.
https://www.automotiveworld.com/articles/water-water-everywh...
isn’t there some law about trading stolen passwords?
I’m a fan of easy to type passphrases designed to spark a riot if ever read in open court since this seems to be a common pivot from the “look the other way when the user types” model I followed when I worked a help desk. We were told when I moved on to Hci research it’s unethical to collect the passwords, there’s a whole cottage industry of academics analyzing leaked data sets since they aren’t allowed to… just ask.
(I’m not Irb certified and not a professor, so I get to do whatever I want.)
>James Comey is watching me poop.
>James Comey is watching me poop in 4K.
(Context is everything, you probably don’t want me to explain the joke.)
I'm intrigued. Example?
Forgive me if I don't feel reassured, given Honda's response to Rolling-PWN.
> Ah, megasquirt! If it wasn't for budget, and my utter inability to work with, or get to work, anything electronic (PCs are plug and play and some drivers, that doesn't count) I would have it or something similar on my '82 Rover V8 by now.
Damn I thought that's a cheap option but I've looked at assembled ones and is near the price of Ecumaster...
I once saw someone put a Bosch (?) EFI from a VW Golf GTI on a 3.5 Rover V8, should almost be cheap, if you onow what you do, so not for me. Either way, I can quite literally rebuild those dual Zenith carbs in the desert (don't ask...), if parts are there. So for overall reliability I take that over a cobled together EFI. At least for now, who knows what the future brings.
Ah, and to answer your question, yes, I think a screw driver counts as a hack!
You think of a Honda Civic as a "model". But Honda has the Civic Sedan, the Civic Sedan Si, the Civic Hatchback, and the Civic Type R. All-in-all, Honda has 13 different "models" listed on their US page. We can assume most other major manufacturers follow suit.
Then some of them may be broken down even further into more ultimately meaningless categories. Yes, the Civic Type R STX Bayonetta Dragon Hyper Ultimate Vroom Vroom edition may be a different "model", but all I see is Civic with too many fucking qualifiers.
And all of them will be using the same base infotainment package. Which isn't ultimately a big deal. You'd want some sort of consistency between your vehicles. Except when there's an issue like this. Then not one model, but every model has an issue.
Let's go full tin-hat and say I want to see where a car has been. By looking up the plate, I can get the registration. By getting the registration I can get Year/Make/Model/Trim. Now with that I can hit a dictionary of the 'best' data provider for that vehicle.
A proper sales conversation would ask for some matrix of covered vehicles, and use that to compare to what they already have in portfolio, possibly account for volume request discounts, etc...
Possibly software version than hardware. Still high to me. How many different Android phone systems are there?
I've owned or rented about four cars of different make and different software bases that would occasionally freeze up when you switch out of reverse into forward, but the cam would still be up, preventing you from accessing important car functions (and distracting the driver).
I've had to look up how to reset infotainment systems on youtube because it just wouldn't turn on at all.
There was also a report of an infotainment system which would glitch out if a radio broadcasted certain characters in their station or track info, causing it to stay stuck on that radio station, even across reboots (IIRC this was traced to an ancient js lib, I may be wrong though). How much help do you think the car manufacturer offered? It was likely asymptotic with 0.
But even if infotainment systems didn't suck for all these reasons, I still wouldn't want one. They seriously just suck ass by their very nature. Just give me a vehicle.
This is interesting and not something I was aware of. Since when does DOT require that?
0: https://www.theautochannel.com/vehicles/new/reviews/wk9415.1...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_S_series#/media/File:1s...
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/subtitle-B/chapter-V/p...
This is a FAR BIGGER threat even in national security terms because an unpatched vulnerability might allow acting on ALL cars in a nation, for instance blocking them in some crucial intersections paralyzing the entire traffic, or push them to consume too much all at once (EVs/plug-in hybrid) from the grid to make mass blackouts and so on.
They're a decade late knee jerk reaction to the huge rear blind spots the Ford Expeditions and Chevy Suburbans that white collar types thought were the cool hot thing to own in 2004ish and characteristically refused to take responsibility for occasionally backing over their kids with them.
The fat pillars came a tad later with side curtain airbags.
I don't agree with the backup camera take (I love mine), but I otherwise generally agree with the dumb car comment. I want my vehicle to be understandable and hackable, so I can work on it without needing access to its computer as much as possible. I don't want aspects of my vehicle to be made available on the public internet. I don't want a touch screen that eliminates tactile controls.
Backup cams are mount lower and have a wider field of view than people do. They are really effective at keeping drivers from running over children. They are incredibly effective at this. Even in my low to the ground compact car, my backup cam sees things I cannot out my back window.
Drive a car from the 80s and 90s with a big greenhouse. The vehicle brochures back then had visibility as a feature of the car. Car reviewers who cover retro cars talk about this a lot. They are always amazed at how much you can see out of older cars.
Visibility was a lot better, but little timmy on a tricycle was still hidden behind the rear trunk.
That said, the number of collision avoidance systems needed in modern cars to make up for the giant pillars has gotten out of hand.
Oh man! I recently rented a car after a very long time; really loved CarPlay experience.
Even if they can’t run full forensics might be able to just browse through the call log or recent trips.
Most cars will have the infotainment in a CAN or flexray network with a bunch of other stuff in the cockpit.
Theoretically unless other systems are tightly integrating with the infotainment (using their GPS localization data for example) you could theoretical just snif the network through your OBD connector and find out what messages your infotainment sends (i.e. whatever messages dissapear when you power the infotainment off).
Most of the time the Body Control Module (the master of ceremonies in the cockpit) is just checking that a particular range of message IDs are being sent to 'assume' that the infotainment is 'online'. So sending those messages on the OBD port as a man-in-the-middle of sorts would theoretically keep all the other systems happy.
So I suppose it really depends on how far you are willing to go. Also I think it would be difficult to make the trim look any good after removing the central infotainment system.
I lost a 2018 Bolt EV this year after my insurance company decided it wasn't worth repairing. My car might not be the perfect candidate for this, but I know there will be parts worth scavenging off of it in the next life for the carcass.
I sure hope to be able to perform one of these conversions myself in the future once the broader "swap infrastructure" and knowledge bases expand to better support individuals like myself (similar to how you can find a wealth of knowledge and aftermarket support for Honda K-series engine swaps into many cars beyond even Honda models).
> Previous reports claimed that Tesla infotainment systems stored Wi-Fi and Spotify passwords.
Like... how else is the car supposed to connect to wifi? And the new OS just has you sign into music services through a qr code.
Call data and other data from devices tethered to it, and for connected infotainment systems also wifi and cellular data which can provide a secondary source of location data in case the location history has been purged.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there are some more rich logs there including CANBUS data from other car systems on some of the newer models.
Overall if you have a late model car especially towards the upper end of the spectrum I would assume the infotainment system has about as much information as a cellphone you carry because they are basically phones stuck to the console at this point.
I've heard tale of all sorts of data that are broadcast back to the manufacturers' servers from your car for later sale to data brokers for advertising, etc. information. Not exactly surprising to hear that that information is available if you connect to the car directly using LE tools.
This info would not be useful to LE, because they don't keep timestamps on the data. But it is a big tell to the dealership how hard you have been driving your car.
0: https://www.carscoops.com/2022/11/this-shop-in-gibraltar-mod...
Remotely unlock/start/locate any remotely connected Honda/Nissan [resolved] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33831127 - Dec 2022 (223 comments)