
The connected car may be the dumbest idea ever, but it’s not going away - shawndumas
http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/05/its-time-for-a-candid-talk-about-connected-cars/
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lnanek2
He's missing some of the capabilities already being demo'ed in labs. Connected
cars won't just talk to the internet and stop lights like he mentions in the
article, they'll also talk to the road (e.g. beacons with the speed the limit,
warnings the road is wet, has construction ahead, etc.) and other cars (e.g.
there's a pot hole in 100 meters, there's a slow down, etc.).

Long ago their were PDAs before there were smartphones and they weren't always
connected to the internet or capable of connecting to each other. Our
smartphones are always connected, however, and are capable of so much more.
Eventually people will think the same about cars. So features better than
"Fitbit for cars" are coming.

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sahaskatta
The security risks associated with connected cars are getting resolved.
Bringing internet connectivity to cars helps improve people's lives in a lot
of ways:

\- OTA updates. The reality of software: there will be bugs. With WiFi or LTE
connectivity, you can fix fundamental issues by pushing updates to batches of
cars in rolling cycles.

\- e911. If you were to be in an accident, the vehicle can dial out to
emergency services automatically with details about the vehicle's location and
condition.

\- Analytics. Every YC tech company most likely collects some form of data
about how people use their product. Why? To be able to discover flaws and
improve their offering. Car companies can build significantly better vehicles
by collecting bits of anonymous telemetry from vehicles.

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rhizome
Almost all of us already have a device in the car that is updated OTA and can
be told to call 911. Car screens should just be dumb bluetooth-connected (or
cable, or dock port) phone display mirrors, probably with a manufacturer-
supplied app. Attack surface is a thing, there is no state of resolution that
can be achieved, especially when people have to own multiple disparate
architectures.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
This. Figure out a standard. Make the consumer the source the general purpose
computing hardware. You cut out a fuckton of cost. We just need some sort of
communication protocol. IMO this might happen when as cars with electronic
everything start getting long in the tooth or it won't happen at all.

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cm3
If you accept that modern cars, like game consoles or tractors, do not belong
to the buyer anymore as they used because of the impossibility of maintaining
them, we can start treating vehicles as leased exclusive-use transportation
devices. Then, we can start managing traffic intelligently and save everybody
time and decrease accidents. We also can stop worrying about drunk driving.

But, if we get rid of ownership of devices, we can have always available and
always functioning devices that will arrive at your foot step in 5 minutes.

That said, I'm concerned about the avenue of control and monitoring this will
provide, but it will happen either way, so we better deal with it properly
instead of suing Uber in 3 years.

What this leaves out is people who genuinely enjoy driving as a pastime and
would face a problem. I don't have a good answer for that except that private
pilots also deal with it right now and we might be best served looking there
for what did/didn't work.

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rhino369
You own your game console and tractor. You are just legally banned from
modding the software on it. Just like you can't modify the reciever on your
AR-15 or the transmit power on the 802.11 wifi devices.

I don't see any reason you'd need to have common ownership to implement 3rd
party traffic control.

~~~
frik
John Deers newest tractors, Tesla's S and Microsoft's Windows 10 are very
different from what we are used to. You simply don't/can't own those products.

In reality, those corporations have complete control over the device. Only
they can activate it for you, it's dongled to your account, you cannot sell it
in aftermarket, they can deactivate it with a killswitch and remove or add
functionality over air without your knowledge, they can spy on you and the
device phones home without any way to completely deactivate it. It's very
wrong.

People who want to own things, should be able to own things. We aren't slaves,
right? People who want to rent/lease a service, may be able to do so as well.

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maxerickson
Controller Area Network.

It seems sort of unlikely that we will be having fiascos like the jeep hack in
5 years. They mostly mitigated that by correcting the stupid configuration of
the connection over the cellular network. It's also easy to imagine that new
systems will not trust the messages coming from components that have an
outside network connection.

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ape4
Can you disconnect your "connected car". eg don't get a 4G account for your
Chevrolet.

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hanief
Connected is not inherently a bad thing. It can be useful as long as the
computer in the car can think and act independently; just like human.

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Havoc
Can't say I see the problem?

The security thing - that can be fixed. Can't be that hard to isolate the
brakes etc from the LTE modem in a sensible manner.

And I also think there will be tangible benefits. e.g. if you think about live
traffic routing on Waze etc. That is still pretty damn primitive in terms of
interactions that are possible yet already fairly useful.

~~~
curried_haskell
Can't be that hard..... oh, but it is.

~~~
Havoc
>Can't be that hard..... oh, but it is.

No more so than securing any other piece of tech connected to the internet &
the same principles apply. Split it into zones like you would a corporate
network & stick firewalls in between to separate the fluffy online stuff from
the core systems. That is ultimately where this is going - a mini network of
devices on wheels.

And if something is really too hot to connect at all then you can always
isolate that system completely.

Obviously its not going to be 100% fool proof but then again nothing is.

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jakeogh
Step by step towards the universal killswitch.

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FussyZeus
There are people driving 50 year old cars today back when those cars were
utter trash brand new. Every time I read a new story about some horrible thing
a couple of engineering students were able to do to a "connected" car with a
couple of lines of code and the right knowhow, I appreciate my old 300 even
more.

If every new car is connected, I'm not buying a new car. Simple as that.

~~~
Karunamon
Eventually you won't have a choice.

How I see this breaking down is that once the automation and connectivity tech
has had a chance to be proven statistically safer, the insurance companies
will move in.

First, discounts for driving a fully automatic car. Smaller, then larger.

Then, normal cars' insurance gets more expensive as the automatics
proliferate. Eventually prohibitively so.

Finally a break point is reached where the legislators see that allowing
comparatively death-trap like normal cars on public roads is irresponsible,
and they become banned.

Car makers react by eventually ceasing production of manual drive cars by all
but special request and for special uses.

~~~
gambiting
My 21 years old Fiat Cinquecento, that doesn't have ABS, power steering,
airbags, and which has a crumple zone probably ending somewhere behind my
head, costs me ~$200/year to insure. Mostly because it's not worth very much.
If older cars are meant to have costlier insurance, then I haven't seen a
single example of that actually happening, ever.

~~~
maxerickson
Do you not insure yourself while you are in it?

As a USian who has driven inexpensive cars, something like 2/3 of my car
insurance payments have been for medical coverage.

If there is a substantial difference in the medical costs associated with auto
drive and manual drive, I'm sure that single payer systems would also account
for it somehow.

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gambiting
I live in the EU. It's the law that any car insurance, even the cheapest one,
has to cover up to 5 million euro in medical expenses(plus up to 3 million
euro in damages to property). I know in US you have to specify how much you
are insuring yourself for, but in EU it's literally unheard of, I guess you
could theoretically ask for more than that 5 million euro cover, but I have no
idea why you would. And yeah, that medical cover is only useful if you need
any rehabilitation afterwards, but I literally can't think of anything that
would actually produce a bill, I could have 10 operations after an accident
and no hospital would actually bill anyone for it(well, they would bill the
government, but the insurer wouldn't care).

~~~
maxerickson
Right, it isn't the same coverage then if the government system is picking up
the hospital bills. Note that I'm not praising the US system here, I was just
surprised at how low a payment you got (I was paying ~$600 for basic liability
and great medical coverage).

The point I'm reaching for is that the system where the government pays for
medical care will likely respond to a substantial difference in safety, at
least in the case it would save the system a substantial amount of money.

