I would like to see some legal and regulatory steps. When we purchased our Ioniq, there was no agreement for data sharing, etc. - we have basically a cash register receipt, nothing more.
Whenever there is a major update, an insanely long T&A appears on the screen. No one is going to read it. The only options are "accept" or clicking it away. If you click it away, it comes back the next day. It cannot possibly be legal for them to basically force T&A - a one-sided contract change - on customers.
I'm fearing the day when my quite old ICE car dies and I end up in a situation where the best option is a newer car that is a computer on wheels running software that I know will stop getting updates very quickly.
Of all the new cars ideas I've seen recently, only the Slate mini-truck seems to be taking a minimalist approach, with no fancy head unit or navigation system.
I'm hopeful that stuff like Android Auto or Apple CarPlay will continue moving some of the risky obsolete-able complexity away of the giant expensive machine I plan to keep for over a decade (the car) and into smaller easier-to-replace ones (my smartphone.)
A quick outline for those who haven't used them: The car's head-display becomes mostly-controlled by your phone, which is what supplies any navigation, music, podcasts, address-book, GPS, cellular data-connection, etc. Meanwhile the car focuses on providing the display/touchpad hardware, inputs from steering-wheel controls, and maybe AM/FM radio modes.
With the right vehicles/adapters I don't even need to take my phone out of my pocket, which is great because then I can't forget it in the car.
This is a bit of a two-edged sword. I kind of doubt that Carplay and Android Auto will keep working with new phones as long as a car can. At which point you will end up with an old smartphone in your car or some workaround like that.
CarPlay Ultra sounds like it's extending it further? That is, it's still essentially VNC† with some data fed from the car and rendered by the phone, but now with multi-monitor support.
† it's more complicated than that, but still a dumb framebuffer.
I can't imagine that the image shown in CarPlay Ultra is still rendered on the phone. It's used to show all driving relevant things (speed etc.). Is a wireless connection to the phone reliable enough so this would be allowed by regulators?
I thought the main image would be rendered on the car using local data and only the entertainment stuff is transferred from the phone.
And also, how would you drive your car without the phone if everything is rendered on the phone? Would they implement an entire backup dashboard for this? I thought it would always show the CarPlay Ultra interface, even when no phone is connected.
This is what I hoped for but based on the Ultra implementation in the Astons is not at all what we’re getting
It seems to require pretty deep integration with the automaker (Aston provides a lot of custom visuals), and based on the available third party reviews it doesn’t work as well as you’d suspect for a flagship integration
I'm not really worried about a lack of updates to an embedded device provided that it isn't network connected. To me the root of the issue, and also a far more concerning problem in and of itself, is that from what I understand modern vehicles are connected to the mobile network and phone home.
Dealerships will want you to service at their shops because they will upload all the BT metadata that the car has logged. Just because it can’t upload data on its own does not mean data instead logged.
Yeah, security is not a liquid. It won't diminish over time, and can't be added by updating. Updates replace something with something else, in this day and age likely third world outsourced code with vibecoded burning dumpster. Disconnecting the device from networks is basically always a better alternative. I don't understand why that much isn't so obvious to HN readers.
I really wish these options would become more common, maybe even similar to the whole ecosystem around old American muscle cars. Pick and choose a (mostly) standardized drive train, standardized battery packs of different capacities and and your electronics to connect everything together.
I thought the issue is more the batteries and weight distribution. That is, EVs usually have the batteries along the length of the chassis to spread the load out, which is not practical to retrofit onto an ICE car.
And if you fill the engine bay on an ICE car with battery packs during the conversion, the weight distribution will be extremely uneven and cause trouble with the suspension and related components, poor handling, etc.
That "etc." hides "moving the heaviest, most flammable and non-extinguishable part of the drivetrain into a primary crumple zone in front of you" pretty neatly. :D
At least in the UK the Kia Niro comes in petrol, plug-in hybrid, and full EV versions of the same chassis. It seems like most Uber drivers in London have replaced their hybrid Prius with an EV Niro.
Same, early 2010s IMO seems to be the point where the industry really started to shift. There are some good cars from before this time, but keep them running past the 2030s will be a challenge.
1980s widespread adoption of electronic fuel injection - this is generally a good thing, cars become more complex but run better more of the time
1990s widespread adoption of more advanced emissions control systems - for reliability i'd say this is only a backwards step - none of these systems are required to propel the car down the road but many of them can stop a car from driving. They are additional complexity, weight and cost for limited functional benefit (in this generation, fuel economy improvements were fairly small compared to the leap from carbs to EFI in the previous gen).
2000s widespread adoption of on-car networks, the emissions diagnostics technology introduced in the previous decade was now no longer the primary use of on-car networks. Now your car stereo knew how to increase its volume as your road speed increased etc. screens became larger and colourful. Onboard software (typically bug ridden) became a security risk.
2010s widespread adoption of telematics maybe? That was more mid-late 2010s though
According to the industry people stopped doing maintenance and were more likely to trade in their vehicle for a new one. So they stopped optimizing for that segment of the audience and started making disposable cars.
Truthfully, industry watched the government bail out the banks, require next to nothing in return, and demanded no prosecutions for illegal behavior. The writing was pretty much on the wall. Industry realized it no longer needed happy customers.
Software updates and data collection. Eg, my mums Toyota Corolla 2018 already has a disabled infotainment button because of dropped support. If it was a 2019 it would have been eligible for an update, but not for 2018.
Lots of cars from the same period are collecting and sharing data to various different companies from weather to insurance.
Personally I don’t want monitoring or software updates, and definitely don’t want any cloud dependencies.
> 2010s widespread adoption of telematics maybe? That was more mid-late 2010s though
I haven't done it yet, but maybe looking into the EU mandatory regulations would make sense. eCall, for instance (a feature that will call for help if you crashed by contacting an operator), was made mandatory in new cars in 2018. The initiative gained traction at around 2013.
I'd say Tesla built a futuristic computer on wheels, with huge screens, always-on internet connectivity, smarter remote features than most other cars, etc. The car itself was exotic enough by being an EV and that drew attention to these other features too. Everyone else started to emulate them for better or worse.
For now these things are modular because it was the cheapest way to build them. If manufacturers get over the hurdle of cost and find a way to have everything more vertically integrated (think Apple) then we'll lose all access to tinker with the hardware which might be a couple of black-box chips, or the software.
This is probably what Apple was trying to sell as a smart car to car manufacturers. They might have dropped those plans to focus in CarPlay and have the phone be that "smart car". Hopefully some brands go the other way and make a dumb car where the brain is entirely the phone but that's handing out a lot of their agency to the phone manufacturer.
On an adjacent theme there has been a large debate in Sweden if a car that has mandated automatic eCall over 2G or 3G is faulty and thus not roadworthy if the 2G and 3G networks are turned off. The eCall feature was introduced broadly in 2018. It still uses modem sounds over a voice phone call to relay car emergency status and position. New solutions for packet only networks (4g and 5G) have been standardised but are not retrofitted to older cars.
There are plenty of modern options. Most of my vehicles do not get over the wire updates ('12 honda civic, '15 base model Colorado, '17 Spark). Our tiguan does, sadly.
It may be easy to get a simple(ish) one now, but there are already a lot of e-bikes out there with "smarts", apps, vendor-lock-ins up the wazoo, cellular connection and the like. If electric cargo bikes ever go mainstream, I expect the majority of them will be techifyed in the same vein as the Hyundai the author wrote about.
This is the whole point: putting intermediaries between you and the things you think you own.
You think you own your car, phone, appliances, but actually, once this system is in place, you will effectively be on some sort of subscription contract with few traditional ownership rights, with many other parties (the car maker, government agencies) able to turn your car off remotely.
Concretely, why not? If you don't get updates, there's nothing to break the thing -- and if you don't have a network connection, you don't need the security updates.
I would be on board with this if the system was not touching the outside world, but it does every time you hook a smartphone to it or if you have an optional data network. Just like with our smartphones, there's nothing stopping a car company from pushing system-damaging updates when they want to steer us toward buying a new vehicle since that one is too outdated/no longer supported.
What you say can be true about a static isolated system, though. My employer has a Windows XP computer still running a machine in our factory. The PC was built built in 2006, connected to the Internet once upon deployment then disconnected thereafter. It has been running the software and machine more or less untouched since, receiving zero updates, performing it's duty as it was built to.
I'm not opposed to a player connected to a phone or other network, but that player doesn't need to be on the CAN bus, or any other car bus. Car speed for volume control, steering wheel buttons, lights, etc. can be communicated from the car to the player via dedicated wires (on/off, pwm, voltage ladder, etc.) like they did it in the early 2000s.
I'm happy to manually apply updates for my immobilizer as necessary. Keyless entry is already broken (recent front page) and can't be fixed via update AFAIK at least without leaving behind all current fobs. Given that it's still using a proprietary encryption scheme from the mid 80s it doesn't seem the manufacturers were particularly concerned about security to begin with.
I know of some modern vehicles that will not start at all if you go about removing the telematics unit.
I am not sure how long will it take before you will not be able to buy a vehicle at all without having to consent to being monitored remotely 24x7, but it will happen sooner than later. And this coming from a developing country. Pretty sure it is much worse in the developed world.
I guess the market for second hand older vehicles might see an uptick because of this and might also see a boom in demand for expertise of maintaining and rejuvenating such vehicles.
I am actually fascinated by car electronics. I had heavily modified the software on mine, but it was easier than modern stuff, no encryption of the code, and even the checksum code only triggered a DTC with no consequences.
The only module that was encrypted was the main module, but it if you knew the security PIN you could do what you wanted. It was determined by people that if you observed the jitter of the CAN line fast enough, you could leak the pin via a side channel attack.
But modern car electronics are encrypted, and some probably have security processors that might trigger some irreversible states if you tamper with them. Modern cars are basically as locked up as a PS5.
I am fascinated by what you are saying and would love to read more about it. How did you go about modifying the software of some part of your car.
Having worked in this field, I can confirm that most such parts these days come with chip supported read/write protections for part of flash that contain the code. But even with no protections, I think that being able to modify embedded firmware is a feat in itself.
It seems to be coming in multiple waves from multiple sides.
One of those is EUs ISA: First a display, now a warning and later actual interference with the driver.
And with the experiences with the current status are enough for me to be against those systems. The car doing an emergency stop because it saw a 30 sign an an adjacent road makes me not wanna purchase such a car. But there will be some time where no alternatives exist.
>>And with the experiences with the current status are enough for me to be against those systems. The car doing an emergency stop because it saw a 30 sign an an adjacent road makes me not wanna purchase such a car.
Just to be clear - I hate these systems. They are unnecessary, don't improve safety, and increase the cost of new cars for everyone.
But, no system in any car works the way you described it. Even if the car recognizes a speed limit sign from an adjecent street(which happens all the time and I have experienced it too) - the only thing that will happen is that it will bong at you, it won't do "an emergency stop". The more hardcore version of the EU laws around it will require cars to stop applying throttle when going faster than the limit, but literally no legislation proposed or implemented now or in the future requires the cars to actively slow down(ie - apply brakes without your input).
I'm sure you are overestimating what an average car buyer cares about when buying the car. From the world where people pay for listening devices to put into their homes, small tracking devices they can stick into everything and so forth. Maybe if it becomes 'fashionable' to worry about privacy, and even then it'll be because it is popular not because majority will become privacy conscious. Unfortunately.
I think stronger regulations, protections and security is the way forward. Not going against the flow, as that is unfortunately a lost battle.
I'm starting to think the short software support isn't a bug, it's a feature. They want the car to feel obsolete in 5 years so you're pushed into buying the next model. It's the smartphone sales model, but for a $50,000 purchase.
You design a new transmission to comply with federal regulations. The transmission is mostly an upgrade of previous designs and built in cooperation with multiple vendors. It's actually not a bad unit.
Which is a problem because it will be too reliable. So you take a small accessory component, like a valve body, and you undersize it and built it out of inappropriate materials. It now starves the transmission, causes it to run hot, and the nice transmission cooks itself to death under even the slightest load.
The hope is you won't even bother to buy and install a new $7000 part. Just scrap the car and get a new one!
If you're buying a new vehicle, find your favorite search engine, then search for "car model year reliability upgrade." You're almost certainly going to want to get a few of those done if you expect the car to be driving in more than 5 years.
The govt should fund $1,000,000 bug bounties on these vehicles. If anyone succeeds in remotely gaining access to the mic, car companies are fined $100,000,000.
Had to look up "yuppie button" to figure out what they were on about.
Sounds like a fun fellow. Lights up all of the lights on the back of the car for funsies. Oh they're all DOT-approved, so it's probably a good idea. Definitely a safety feature. Their manifesto makes them totally believe that everyone else on the road is the problem.
30+ paragraphs is not “measured” or “reasonable” and I’m glad I’m not stuck behind this miserable guy on the highway as he huffs his jenkem going 56 in a 55 trying to blast all his rear lights at people.
To a degree this is sensible, if someone is tailgating you and you need to perform an emergency stop there's more likely to be a collision, so you need to increase the space in front of you for more gradual braking.
I use my fog lights. They can screw right off as I am already going the maximum speed allowed on the road and I will not go faster. Works for 95%, the other 5% are such nutjobs that probably not even a bullet to the head would help them.
Same. I start driving at a speed that is safe for the distance they're keeping (in stead of what should be the other way around). That is usually quite effective.
You'll just have to lower it more if they start getting closer again. Eventually they'll get the courage to pass instead of hugging your rear bumper, and at safer speeds too
> Somewhat related, an easy early fix was to disable the car's microphone in the headliner light assembly.
This (and maybe the things he does further on) would probably interfer with the eCall system that is mandatory for cars in Europe. The author seems to be in the US so that might be fine, but if you're in Europe, please don't do stuff like this.
I suppose such system is mandatory in a car when it's sold, such after sales changes would be fine as safety is not directly impacted.
Source: my daily drive is a car without a modem on European roads, no problem.
All modifications to the car (in most, if not all EU countries) need to be homologated (eg. approved) by the authorities. So yes, removing eCall from a modern vehicle is (legally speaking) a lot different than driving one that came without it.
Obviously, that's a nice theory but as we both know in practice there's a lot of modified cars on the roads in all kinds of way and they pass their annual inspections fine - even insurers cover them as long as you disclose the modification.
Well, safety is impacted, but it seems to be up to you. If you want to go down like _a real man_ because your car couldn't call emergency services that's your choice. Other people might (hopefully) make another choice.
Well thats a choice right? We dont NEED these systems, its just mandated by governments. Just like here in spain they changed from emergency triangles that you need to put on the street to a little crappy light you put ontop of the car. That light will do nothing in sunny spain or if your car happened to stop after a curve. Its stupid crap mandated by governments to make it look like they are actually doing something new, but they forget about basic stuff. Same thing with this call system, its my car so my choice. If they want to take my car apart to figure out that i disabled it, then go ahead. I'll just pull the plug the moment you force me to plug it back in.
eCall is also opening up a two way communication with the emergency line, so they can gather more information. Might be helpful if your microphone does work in that case.
The law text might appear to allow other interpretation as laws always do, but I believe the actual implementation is a phone with power input, an electronic report trigger API, a mechanical 911 button, and optional SIM. They come with a mic and a speaker.
I am all for removing this needless communication the manufacturers are equipping cars with now, but between your cell phone associating with towers, the Flock cameras that every municipality has eagerly deployed, the repo bounty people driving parking lots with LPRs, and LEOs with on-car LPRs you're still being tracked.
I remember reading that (some?) phones in airplane mode can still be pinged by the network to request their location and the call is answered directly by the blackbox modem rather than by Android/iOS bypassing most privacy features.
Airplane mode also usually keeps Bluetooth and WiFi enabled so that's one thing to look for.
On the less-technical side, Hyundai has a corporate-legal mechanism to request "Delete personal information" [0] that might be worth doing, just to round things out.
> one step of which involved removing this "garnish" panel behind the screen. Easier said than done
Different year/model, but same experience with the same task: I really hate situations where the secret is "a suspicious amount of force", especially if there's no sufficiently trustworthy/detailed information showing that things can be pulled or pried in a certain manner.
> Having a couple of non-marring plastic pry tools does help with this sort of thing
IMO these are worth buying, they're quite cheap and trying to make-do with metal tools will cause more scratches and scrapes than you'd expect, no matter how careful you're trying to be.
Having worked in a car factory, getting involved in the rectification side of things, I can say that "a suspicious amount of force" is pretty normal for this stuff. If you're working on a car you need to be able to get behind the panels, but they need to be held on well enough to never, ever rattle.
Looking for trustworthy information these days is much easier than it used to be, there are generally technician training videos on youtube that will show you where and how to pop panels off.
If they had just clipped the antenna wires, how likely would that have disabled all outbound communication? Clearly not as good as disconnecting the modem (which removed some software checks), but more approachable without the multi hour disassembly.
If you install fully shielded resistors it can work, but shorting the antenna completely will have the added benefit of destroying the RF amplifier transistors. From then on the car will just think it’s out of cell range, and there’s not much chance of leaky signal. It’s not too hard to make shielded loads though.
I do prefer the option of removing the entire cellular module though.
Any non-disable-able connectivity will be an absolute deal breaker for me on any vehicle I own. I guess that probably means I’ll be buying used vehicles for the rest of my life, but it is what it is.
Nice work. I'm honestly surprised that the head unit didn't complain about the missing modem. Although it's far from returning to a simpler less software heavy car, removing the cellular connectivity is a promising start that surely hugely reduces the attack surface of the vehicle
It’s quite upsetting that if you want a modern car so that you utilise the newest advances in safety, you have to consent to constant tracking, enshitification, subscription services, etc. It would be really cool if you could get something like a ‘67 impala that doesn’t make ‘67 emissions and has actual seatbelts and airbags…
It's really a regulatory problem, where I live my 2025 toyota has a big display saying "the car is unable to send or receive any data if you don't press press accept", pressing decline gives the car that out of cell range symbol. Doesen't prevent targeted surveillance nor mass government surveillance, but those are more about regulations too.
I would like to see some legal and regulatory steps. When we purchased our Ioniq, there was no agreement for data sharing, etc. - we have basically a cash register receipt, nothing more.
Whenever there is a major update, an insanely long T&A appears on the screen. No one is going to read it. The only options are "accept" or clicking it away. If you click it away, it comes back the next day. It cannot possibly be legal for them to basically force T&A - a one-sided contract change - on customers.
I'm fearing the day when my quite old ICE car dies and I end up in a situation where the best option is a newer car that is a computer on wheels running software that I know will stop getting updates very quickly.
Of all the new cars ideas I've seen recently, only the Slate mini-truck seems to be taking a minimalist approach, with no fancy head unit or navigation system.
I'm hopeful that stuff like Android Auto or Apple CarPlay will continue moving some of the risky obsolete-able complexity away of the giant expensive machine I plan to keep for over a decade (the car) and into smaller easier-to-replace ones (my smartphone.)
A quick outline for those who haven't used them: The car's head-display becomes mostly-controlled by your phone, which is what supplies any navigation, music, podcasts, address-book, GPS, cellular data-connection, etc. Meanwhile the car focuses on providing the display/touchpad hardware, inputs from steering-wheel controls, and maybe AM/FM radio modes.
With the right vehicles/adapters I don't even need to take my phone out of my pocket, which is great because then I can't forget it in the car.
This is a bit of a two-edged sword. I kind of doubt that Carplay and Android Auto will keep working with new phones as long as a car can. At which point you will end up with an old smartphone in your car or some workaround like that.
This is not the direction that the software is going in.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/05/carplay-ultra-the-nex...
CarPlay Ultra sounds like it's extending it further? That is, it's still essentially VNC† with some data fed from the car and rendered by the phone, but now with multi-monitor support.
† it's more complicated than that, but still a dumb framebuffer.
I can't imagine that the image shown in CarPlay Ultra is still rendered on the phone. It's used to show all driving relevant things (speed etc.). Is a wireless connection to the phone reliable enough so this would be allowed by regulators?
I thought the main image would be rendered on the car using local data and only the entertainment stuff is transferred from the phone.
And also, how would you drive your car without the phone if everything is rendered on the phone? Would they implement an entire backup dashboard for this? I thought it would always show the CarPlay Ultra interface, even when no phone is connected.
This is what I hoped for but based on the Ultra implementation in the Astons is not at all what we’re getting
It seems to require pretty deep integration with the automaker (Aston provides a lot of custom visuals), and based on the available third party reviews it doesn’t work as well as you’d suspect for a flagship integration
> but still a dumb framebuffer.
Nope. Your car and phone exchanges some info, too. Like serial numbers, some real time telemetry data, etc.
fascinating idea, but no mention of android. Would one (like me!) simply be unable to use this car to its full extent?
I'm not really worried about a lack of updates to an embedded device provided that it isn't network connected. To me the root of the issue, and also a far more concerning problem in and of itself, is that from what I understand modern vehicles are connected to the mobile network and phone home.
Dealerships will want you to service at their shops because they will upload all the BT metadata that the car has logged. Just because it can’t upload data on its own does not mean data instead logged.
Yeah, security is not a liquid. It won't diminish over time, and can't be added by updating. Updates replace something with something else, in this day and age likely third world outsourced code with vibecoded burning dumpster. Disconnecting the device from networks is basically always a better alternative. I don't understand why that much isn't so obvious to HN readers.
If you are not connected to the internet and installing the latest patches, you will be vulnerable to the next RCE!
Another option is converting an ICE car to EV:
https://openinverter.org/wiki/ZombieVerter_VCU https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43898280 https://youtube.com/@evbmw
I really wish these options would become more common, maybe even similar to the whole ecosystem around old American muscle cars. Pick and choose a (mostly) standardized drive train, standardized battery packs of different capacities and and your electronics to connect everything together.
I thought the issue is more the batteries and weight distribution. That is, EVs usually have the batteries along the length of the chassis to spread the load out, which is not practical to retrofit onto an ICE car.
And if you fill the engine bay on an ICE car with battery packs during the conversion, the weight distribution will be extremely uneven and cause trouble with the suspension and related components, poor handling, etc.
> etc.
That "etc." hides "moving the heaviest, most flammable and non-extinguishable part of the drivetrain into a primary crumple zone in front of you" pretty neatly. :D
Yeah, I don't believe even OEMs ever managed to make a very liked electric car on an ICE platform.
At least in the UK the Kia Niro comes in petrol, plug-in hybrid, and full EV versions of the same chassis. It seems like most Uber drivers in London have replaced their hybrid Prius with an EV Niro.
Live somewhere with snow or near an ocean. Your frame now has a very short life span. Swapping engines isn't the actual problem.
Reminds me of old Mercedes and BWMs with built-in NMT phones in their console. The cars lasted a lot longer than the NMT standard for mobile phones.
Same, early 2010s IMO seems to be the point where the industry really started to shift. There are some good cars from before this time, but keep them running past the 2030s will be a challenge.
What happened in the early 2010s?
1980s widespread adoption of electronic fuel injection - this is generally a good thing, cars become more complex but run better more of the time
1990s widespread adoption of more advanced emissions control systems - for reliability i'd say this is only a backwards step - none of these systems are required to propel the car down the road but many of them can stop a car from driving. They are additional complexity, weight and cost for limited functional benefit (in this generation, fuel economy improvements were fairly small compared to the leap from carbs to EFI in the previous gen).
2000s widespread adoption of on-car networks, the emissions diagnostics technology introduced in the previous decade was now no longer the primary use of on-car networks. Now your car stereo knew how to increase its volume as your road speed increased etc. screens became larger and colourful. Onboard software (typically bug ridden) became a security risk.
2010s widespread adoption of telematics maybe? That was more mid-late 2010s though
> What happened in the early 2010s?
According to the industry people stopped doing maintenance and were more likely to trade in their vehicle for a new one. So they stopped optimizing for that segment of the audience and started making disposable cars.
Truthfully, industry watched the government bail out the banks, require next to nothing in return, and demanded no prosecutions for illegal behavior. The writing was pretty much on the wall. Industry realized it no longer needed happy customers.
Software updates and data collection. Eg, my mums Toyota Corolla 2018 already has a disabled infotainment button because of dropped support. If it was a 2019 it would have been eligible for an update, but not for 2018.
Lots of cars from the same period are collecting and sharing data to various different companies from weather to insurance.
Personally I don’t want monitoring or software updates, and definitely don’t want any cloud dependencies.
> 2010s widespread adoption of telematics maybe? That was more mid-late 2010s though
I haven't done it yet, but maybe looking into the EU mandatory regulations would make sense. eCall, for instance (a feature that will call for help if you crashed by contacting an operator), was made mandatory in new cars in 2018. The initiative gained traction at around 2013.
2010s, in software, vertical integration, and digital feudalism? iPhone?
> What happened in the early 2010s?
I'd say Tesla built a futuristic computer on wheels, with huge screens, always-on internet connectivity, smarter remote features than most other cars, etc. The car itself was exotic enough by being an EV and that drew attention to these other features too. Everyone else started to emulate them for better or worse.
For now these things are modular because it was the cheapest way to build them. If manufacturers get over the hurdle of cost and find a way to have everything more vertically integrated (think Apple) then we'll lose all access to tinker with the hardware which might be a couple of black-box chips, or the software.
This is probably what Apple was trying to sell as a smart car to car manufacturers. They might have dropped those plans to focus in CarPlay and have the phone be that "smart car". Hopefully some brands go the other way and make a dumb car where the brain is entirely the phone but that's handing out a lot of their agency to the phone manufacturer.
There are some good cars from before this time, but keep them running past the 2030s will be a challenge.
If it's a pre-computer car, all you need is a machine shop or access to one.
This problem solved itself on my car because it only has a 3G modem.
On an adjacent theme there has been a large debate in Sweden if a car that has mandated automatic eCall over 2G or 3G is faulty and thus not roadworthy if the 2G and 3G networks are turned off. The eCall feature was introduced broadly in 2018. It still uses modem sounds over a voice phone call to relay car emergency status and position. New solutions for packet only networks (4g and 5G) have been standardised but are not retrofitted to older cars.
There are plenty of modern options. Most of my vehicles do not get over the wire updates ('12 honda civic, '15 base model Colorado, '17 Spark). Our tiguan does, sadly.
Consider an electric cargo bike if you're life will suite it.
It may be easy to get a simple(ish) one now, but there are already a lot of e-bikes out there with "smarts", apps, vendor-lock-ins up the wazoo, cellular connection and the like. If electric cargo bikes ever go mainstream, I expect the majority of them will be techifyed in the same vein as the Hyundai the author wrote about.
For what it's worth, the first Tesla model that ever got software upgrades is still getting them. That's the Model S from 2012.
There's no way they're going to keep a modular car functioning for years without relying on frequent software updates.
Did it for 100 years. Nkthing changed. They don't need to make cars into surveillance systems. That's a choice.
This is the whole point: putting intermediaries between you and the things you think you own.
You think you own your car, phone, appliances, but actually, once this system is in place, you will effectively be on some sort of subscription contract with few traditional ownership rights, with many other parties (the car maker, government agencies) able to turn your car off remotely.
Nice and safe.
Concretely, why not? If you don't get updates, there's nothing to break the thing -- and if you don't have a network connection, you don't need the security updates.
I would be on board with this if the system was not touching the outside world, but it does every time you hook a smartphone to it or if you have an optional data network. Just like with our smartphones, there's nothing stopping a car company from pushing system-damaging updates when they want to steer us toward buying a new vehicle since that one is too outdated/no longer supported.
What you say can be true about a static isolated system, though. My employer has a Windows XP computer still running a machine in our factory. The PC was built built in 2006, connected to the Internet once upon deployment then disconnected thereafter. It has been running the software and machine more or less untouched since, receiving zero updates, performing it's duty as it was built to.
I'm not opposed to a player connected to a phone or other network, but that player doesn't need to be on the CAN bus, or any other car bus. Car speed for volume control, steering wheel buttons, lights, etc. can be communicated from the car to the player via dedicated wires (on/off, pwm, voltage ladder, etc.) like they did it in the early 2000s.
You might need security updates for security systems, like immobilisers, keyless entry etc.
I'm happy to manually apply updates for my immobilizer as necessary. Keyless entry is already broken (recent front page) and can't be fixed via update AFAIK at least without leaving behind all current fobs. Given that it's still using a proprietary encryption scheme from the mid 80s it doesn't seem the manufacturers were particularly concerned about security to begin with.
The only security update for those is removal. Immobilizers via RFID chip were never broken AFAIK.
You can just not connect to the internet and then it does not matter if software in your car is 1 month or 20 years old.
I know of some modern vehicles that will not start at all if you go about removing the telematics unit.
I am not sure how long will it take before you will not be able to buy a vehicle at all without having to consent to being monitored remotely 24x7, but it will happen sooner than later. And this coming from a developing country. Pretty sure it is much worse in the developed world.
I guess the market for second hand older vehicles might see an uptick because of this and might also see a boom in demand for expertise of maintaining and rejuvenating such vehicles.
Bicycles also count as vehicles and not all of them have electronics. There are some decent low tech ones at different price ranges:
https://www.rivbike.com/collections/current-models
https://velo-orange.com/collections/frames-1
https://shop.fairdalebikes.com/collections/fairdale-bikes
I am actually fascinated by car electronics. I had heavily modified the software on mine, but it was easier than modern stuff, no encryption of the code, and even the checksum code only triggered a DTC with no consequences.
The only module that was encrypted was the main module, but it if you knew the security PIN you could do what you wanted. It was determined by people that if you observed the jitter of the CAN line fast enough, you could leak the pin via a side channel attack.
But modern car electronics are encrypted, and some probably have security processors that might trigger some irreversible states if you tamper with them. Modern cars are basically as locked up as a PS5.
I am fascinated by what you are saying and would love to read more about it. How did you go about modifying the software of some part of your car.
Having worked in this field, I can confirm that most such parts these days come with chip supported read/write protections for part of flash that contain the code. But even with no protections, I think that being able to modify embedded firmware is a feat in itself.
It seems to be coming in multiple waves from multiple sides.
One of those is EUs ISA: First a display, now a warning and later actual interference with the driver.
And with the experiences with the current status are enough for me to be against those systems. The car doing an emergency stop because it saw a 30 sign an an adjacent road makes me not wanna purchase such a car. But there will be some time where no alternatives exist.
>>And with the experiences with the current status are enough for me to be against those systems. The car doing an emergency stop because it saw a 30 sign an an adjacent road makes me not wanna purchase such a car.
Just to be clear - I hate these systems. They are unnecessary, don't improve safety, and increase the cost of new cars for everyone.
But, no system in any car works the way you described it. Even if the car recognizes a speed limit sign from an adjecent street(which happens all the time and I have experienced it too) - the only thing that will happen is that it will bong at you, it won't do "an emergency stop". The more hardcore version of the EU laws around it will require cars to stop applying throttle when going faster than the limit, but literally no legislation proposed or implemented now or in the future requires the cars to actively slow down(ie - apply brakes without your input).
I'm sure you are overestimating what an average car buyer cares about when buying the car. From the world where people pay for listening devices to put into their homes, small tracking devices they can stick into everything and so forth. Maybe if it becomes 'fashionable' to worry about privacy, and even then it'll be because it is popular not because majority will become privacy conscious. Unfortunately.
I think stronger regulations, protections and security is the way forward. Not going against the flow, as that is unfortunately a lost battle.
Some developing countries such as India, are completely banning the ply of old vehicles on the road.
I'm starting to think the short software support isn't a bug, it's a feature. They want the car to feel obsolete in 5 years so you're pushed into buying the next model. It's the smartphone sales model, but for a $50,000 purchase.
It's everywhere.
You design a new transmission to comply with federal regulations. The transmission is mostly an upgrade of previous designs and built in cooperation with multiple vendors. It's actually not a bad unit.
Which is a problem because it will be too reliable. So you take a small accessory component, like a valve body, and you undersize it and built it out of inappropriate materials. It now starves the transmission, causes it to run hot, and the nice transmission cooks itself to death under even the slightest load.
The hope is you won't even bother to buy and install a new $7000 part. Just scrap the car and get a new one!
If you're buying a new vehicle, find your favorite search engine, then search for "car model year reliability upgrade." You're almost certainly going to want to get a few of those done if you expect the car to be driving in more than 5 years.
Planned obsolescence
Planned Obsolescence 2.0 - they can tell the system when it's time to die.
So maybe it should be called: "Remote Controlled Obsolescence" now?
The govt should fund $1,000,000 bug bounties on these vehicles. If anyone succeeds in remotely gaining access to the mic, car companies are fined $100,000,000.
All you will get out of the government being involved is automatic police access to your car's mic.
Isn't it quite the opposite right now?
Even attempting responsible disclosure on vulnerabilities when it comes to cars can quickly result in a gag order.
[Citation needed, but not hard to google, been discussed here before]
Government aren’t exactly the privacy guys …
I think that's more likely to get companies to remove mics than to make them secure.
I'm genuinely struggling to think of downsides in that. Surely the most 'secure' microphone is the one that doesn't exist in the first place?
good?
Yes
Car companies, including Hyundai, pay fines of that magnitude every few years for various issues. Yet the issues keep coming.
Had to look up "yuppie button" to figure out what they were on about.
Sounds like a fun fellow. Lights up all of the lights on the back of the car for funsies. Oh they're all DOT-approved, so it's probably a good idea. Definitely a safety feature. Their manifesto makes them totally believe that everyone else on the road is the problem.
https://techno-fandom.org/~hobbit/cars/yb/
The techno fandom page is actually quite measured and reasonable. It's not a crazy idea to prevent dangerous behavior of those behind you.
30+ paragraphs is not “measured” or “reasonable” and I’m glad I’m not stuck behind this miserable guy on the highway as he huffs his jenkem going 56 in a 55 trying to blast all his rear lights at people.
If someone is tailgating me I just slow down gradually until they get mad and pass
To a degree this is sensible, if someone is tailgating you and you need to perform an emergency stop there's more likely to be a collision, so you need to increase the space in front of you for more gradual braking.
I use my fog lights. They can screw right off as I am already going the maximum speed allowed on the road and I will not go faster. Works for 95%, the other 5% are such nutjobs that probably not even a bullet to the head would help them.
Same. I start driving at a speed that is safe for the distance they're keeping (in stead of what should be the other way around). That is usually quite effective.
That distance is also a function of their speed though.
You'll just have to lower it more if they start getting closer again. Eventually they'll get the courage to pass instead of hugging your rear bumper, and at safer speeds too
Why?
I also don't have any need for that, because I never answer or even use my phone while driving.
> Somewhat related, an easy early fix was to disable the car's microphone in the headliner light assembly.
This (and maybe the things he does further on) would probably interfer with the eCall system that is mandatory for cars in Europe. The author seems to be in the US so that might be fine, but if you're in Europe, please don't do stuff like this.
I suppose such system is mandatory in a car when it's sold, such after sales changes would be fine as safety is not directly impacted. Source: my daily drive is a car without a modem on European roads, no problem.
All modifications to the car (in most, if not all EU countries) need to be homologated (eg. approved) by the authorities. So yes, removing eCall from a modern vehicle is (legally speaking) a lot different than driving one that came without it.
Obviously, that's a nice theory but as we both know in practice there's a lot of modified cars on the roads in all kinds of way and they pass their annual inspections fine - even insurers cover them as long as you disclose the modification.
Well, safety is impacted, but it seems to be up to you. If you want to go down like _a real man_ because your car couldn't call emergency services that's your choice. Other people might (hopefully) make another choice.
Well thats a choice right? We dont NEED these systems, its just mandated by governments. Just like here in spain they changed from emergency triangles that you need to put on the street to a little crappy light you put ontop of the car. That light will do nothing in sunny spain or if your car happened to stop after a curve. Its stupid crap mandated by governments to make it look like they are actually doing something new, but they forget about basic stuff. Same thing with this call system, its my car so my choice. If they want to take my car apart to figure out that i disabled it, then go ahead. I'll just pull the plug the moment you force me to plug it back in.
eCall is sending GPS location after the crash, microphone is not necessary.
eCall is also opening up a two way communication with the emergency line, so they can gather more information. Might be helpful if your microphone does work in that case.
The law text might appear to allow other interpretation as laws always do, but I believe the actual implementation is a phone with power input, an electronic report trigger API, a mechanical 911 button, and optional SIM. They come with a mic and a speaker.
It's mandatory for cars to be manufactured with it, but obviously not for all cars to have it since the are many older cars on the road without it.
That's true, only cars build after March 2018 need to have it. If you car is older you're fine.
So people are supposed to pay 10x the price of what they can get actually pretty decent used cars for and then not have control over the firmware?
These companies deserve bankruptcy.
I am all for removing this needless communication the manufacturers are equipping cars with now, but between your cell phone associating with towers, the Flock cameras that every municipality has eagerly deployed, the repo bounty people driving parking lots with LPRs, and LEOs with on-car LPRs you're still being tracked.
Still, no reason to make it easier.
It can all be fought. https://deflock.me/
I keep my phone in Airplane Mode. Can't do a ton about private ALPRs except put peanut butter on them or whatever when you see em
I remember reading that (some?) phones in airplane mode can still be pinged by the network to request their location and the call is answered directly by the blackbox modem rather than by Android/iOS bypassing most privacy features.
Airplane mode also usually keeps Bluetooth and WiFi enabled so that's one thing to look for.
On the less-technical side, Hyundai has a corporate-legal mechanism to request "Delete personal information" [0] that might be worth doing, just to round things out.
> one step of which involved removing this "garnish" panel behind the screen. Easier said than done
Different year/model, but same experience with the same task: I really hate situations where the secret is "a suspicious amount of force", especially if there's no sufficiently trustworthy/detailed information showing that things can be pulled or pried in a certain manner.
> Having a couple of non-marring plastic pry tools does help with this sort of thing
IMO these are worth buying, they're quite cheap and trying to make-do with metal tools will cause more scratches and scrapes than you'd expect, no matter how careful you're trying to be.
[0] https://owners.hyundaiusa.com/us/en/privacy/data-request/new...
Having worked in a car factory, getting involved in the rectification side of things, I can say that "a suspicious amount of force" is pretty normal for this stuff. If you're working on a car you need to be able to get behind the panels, but they need to be held on well enough to never, ever rattle.
Looking for trustworthy information these days is much easier than it used to be, there are generally technician training videos on youtube that will show you where and how to pop panels off.
Plus they're fun to say. Spudger!
Yes. I, too, shall spudge.
I like this Techno Fandom page!
If they had just clipped the antenna wires, how likely would that have disabled all outbound communication? Clearly not as good as disconnecting the modem (which removed some software checks), but more approachable without the multi hour disassembly.
If you install fully shielded resistors it can work, but shorting the antenna completely will have the added benefit of destroying the RF amplifier transistors. From then on the car will just think it’s out of cell range, and there’s not much chance of leaky signal. It’s not too hard to make shielded loads though.
I do prefer the option of removing the entire cellular module though.
Any non-disable-able connectivity will be an absolute deal breaker for me on any vehicle I own. I guess that probably means I’ll be buying used vehicles for the rest of my life, but it is what it is.
You generally have to disassemble far more annoying things to get to the antenna than to remove the head unit.
A better way might be to install dummy loads on the antenna outputs.
Nice work. I'm honestly surprised that the head unit didn't complain about the missing modem. Although it's far from returning to a simpler less software heavy car, removing the cellular connectivity is a promising start that surely hugely reduces the attack surface of the vehicle
It’s quite upsetting that if you want a modern car so that you utilise the newest advances in safety, you have to consent to constant tracking, enshitification, subscription services, etc. It would be really cool if you could get something like a ‘67 impala that doesn’t make ‘67 emissions and has actual seatbelts and airbags…
It's really a regulatory problem, where I live my 2025 toyota has a big display saying "the car is unable to send or receive any data if you don't press press accept", pressing decline gives the car that out of cell range symbol. Doesen't prevent targeted surveillance nor mass government surveillance, but those are more about regulations too.
I guess the next thing is to kill the black box and you are set.
My biggest gripe with the modern cars (looking at you EV) is they’re now made to be like a mobile phone with wheels