
GM can manage an EV's batteries wirelessly and remotely - clouddrover
https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/energy/batteries-storage/ieee-spectrum-exclusive-gm-can-manage-an-evs-batteries-wirelesslyand-remotely
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hpoe
I see a lot of people complaining about why this is pointless but the much
more worrying thing for me is what happens when you suddenly "subscribe" to
your car and if you haven't made you GM payment well then sorry you won't be
driving anywhere until you pay plus a $20 late fee plus a $30 accelerated
processing thing.

Beyond even that lets imagine a CCTV catches a crime runs an ML scan of all
the people in the city it hits your face with a 83% match, better then any one
else. Boom the Department of Automated Crime Prevention uses the government
mandated kill switch that is required to be available in every vehicle. When
you finally find out why your car doesn't work you find out you can't get it
reactivated until the following Monday because it is 5:45 on a Friday
afternoon and the government offices are now closed.

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user99099
People are begging to go under a gestapo regime that tracks and monitors
everything like 1984. Its amazing

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nordsieck
> Unlike today’s battery modules, which link up to an on-board management
> system through a tangle of orange wiring, GM’s system features RF antennas
> integrated on circuit boards. The antennas allow the transfer of data via a
> 2.4-gigahertz wireless protocol similar to Bluetooth but with lower power.
> Slave modules report back to an onboard master, sending measurements of cell
> voltages and other data. That onboard master can also talk through the cloud
> to GM.

I can understand why GM wants batteries to report their health to the cloud,
but can anyone explain why they want wireless networking for in-car
components?

I know Elon Musk bragged for a while about reducing the amount of wiring that
was going into the model Y (AFAICT, that didn't end up happening, or it was
very poorly communicated) as a sort of manufacturing advantage to decrease
labor costs. Perhaps that is the rationale?

That just seems like a poor reason to reduce the reliability of component
communications in the car.

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kevin_thibedeau
It's probably just an unrelated research project. The "reason" you'd want it
is to save money on wire harness construction and installation. The reason you
don't do foolish things like this is poor reliability. How many five year old
BMWs and Mercs _don 't_ have something wrong with their CAN bus peripheral
lighting.

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akira2501
One other possible reason is to severely hamper any third party service or
parts market from forming around this part of the car, and in particular,
their IP.

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jabagonuts
> “You can have one central warehouse monitoring all these devices,” says
> Fiona Meyer-Teruel, GM’s lead engineer for battery system electronics

How could this possibly go wrong?

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dragonsky
Why is it that you can't get a car that hasn't had BS click bate "features"
added for marketing purposes that inevitably make the vehicle less reliable
and in most cases does nothing beneficial. How on earth does having radio
communication between components in a vehicle that could end up in all types
of radio environment make sense. What are the benefits? It's slower, prone to
interference and certainly prone to malicious interference... Who hasn't
experienced interference to the bluetooth connection between phone and audio
system whilst driving?

What happened to the good old days when special features was chrome and
whitewalls.... Ah I'm getting old, get off my grass..

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badrabbit
Maybe your travel can be restricted wirelessly? I bet governments salivate
over this.

But wireless charging would be awesome. Just charge at any parking lot without
doing anything.

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zaroth
The level of marketing fluff in TFA is just unbearable.

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dawnerd
They’re acting like this is somehow better than what Tesla has simply because
it’s wireless? I don’t get the point.

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lgats

       Unlike today’s battery modules, which link up to an on-board management system through a tangle of orange wiring, GM’s system features RF antennas integrated on circuit boards. The antennas allow the transfer of data via a 2.4-gigahertz wireless protocol similar to Bluetooth but with lower power. Slave modules report back to an onboard master, sending measurements of cell voltages and other data.  That onboard master can also talk through the cloud to GM.

~~~
p1necone
They're trying _really_ hard to make this sound like an improvement, but it's
really not. Wiring is not going to be visible in the car - and it's going to
be much more foolproof. What if someone turns on an RF jammer in the car next
to you on the highway? Surely you still need wires for critical systems even
if you run some stuff wirelessly.

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eximius
That sounds... worse?

~~~
myself248
We took a reliable wired connection between two pieces that never move
relative to each other, and replaced it with a wireless one!

What could go wrong?

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sneak
This means the police and military can, too, with the right demands to GM.

(And, in the right circumstances, perhaps other militaries as well.)

Remote disablement of physical infrastructure, with due process recourse for
misuse weeks, months, or years after-the-fact, truly terrifies me. This is
basic health and safety stuff.

I simply don’t trust the rule of law enough in the Five Eyes anymore to assume
these things won’t eventually be abused by the state.

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wrkronmiller
This does not at first glance seem exceptionally better than what Tesla can
presumably do with their vehicle telemetry.

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cbsks
You are right. This article doesn’t really say anything except that this
version is wireless, and Tesla’s is wired. Why should I, as a consumer, care?

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elihu
Well, with this new system every battery cell becomes another device that
needs to be secured from remote attack and receive periodic security updates
until the manufacturer decides they can't be bothered anymore. From that
standpoint, it's worse than the hard-wired systems they replace which worked
fine.

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coronadisaster
The problem with wirelessly controlled cars is that there is no instructions
on how to disable it.

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crumpled
People seem worried about the connection being wireless on this battery. As
far as I can tell from the article, the only consequence of a connectivity
loss is: GM gets less data. It doesn't seem consequential to the consumer.

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excalibur
> Software and battery nodes can be reprogrammed over-the-air. With that in
> mind, the system was designed with end-to-end encryption to prevent hacking.

Forget about connectivity loss, the worst case here is the ability for an
attacker to remotely turn your battery into a bomb. End-to-end encryption does
not come close to covering all possible attack vectors.

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justsomedood
Does this mean that battery levels reported to the driver could fluctuate and
be inaccurate when there is interference?

