The Dangers of High Tech Cars No One is Talking About

Featured article by Jeremy Sutter, Independent Technology Author

As cars become saturated with more onboard tech, the potential for dangers involving such vehicles has increased in step with these advancements. While you may have taken a driving safety course to prepare you for taking your high tech car out on the open road, this may not prepare you for what could happen to your high tech car at a moment’s notice as control is stripped out from under you. In fact, you may not be in as tight control of what your car does as you might think.

Hacking Attempts

It used to be that a hacker had to break a window or pop a lock with a slim Jim to gain access to a random car. Today’s hackers can take advantage of the onboard tech inside the car to gain immediate access. Since many of these cars use a common software platform for handling pass codes, all a hacker needs to steal a high tech car is the right software and a little hacking experience. Before the owner knows it, their high tech car is being whisked away, transported out of the country and sold on the black market for pennies on the dollar.

The Inside Job

Since car manufacturers keep a list of pass codes in a national registry, anyone with access to that registry can potentially gain access inside your high tech car. This means that aside from the local car thieving rings, manufacturers are potentially suspect to being involved in the process of making it easier to hack cars and may even be actively involved in doing the deed. This means the manufacturer could repossess and modify your car for resale any time they like. This is not to say they necessarily would do such a thing; however, it is certainly something that consumers of high tech vehicles should be completely aware of being a possibility.

Network Connectivity

According to BBC, one of the inherent problems with high tech cars is that they are becoming more and more connected. As these cars engage active networks, where the car and other external systems are talking back and forth, this opens up new security questions concerning the dangers such connectivity procedures create: especially the question of whether or not a hacker can directly assume control over the car’s onboard electronic control units (ECUs). It begs the question of what prevents someone from taking over a vehicle’s operation by remote to wreak havoc on the road by involving the compromised vehicle in accidents or something worse.

Manufacturers Left in the Dark

Since many ECUs being used in high tech cars are built by third party manufacturers, the actual car manufacturer is left completely unaware as to how these black boxes actually work. In numerous cases, the third party companies creating these devices are not willing to talk about how their units actually operate. This means if there is a serious problem with one of many onboard ECUs that the manufacturer cannot intelligently comment on the best way to remedy the problem. Without increased transparency in this particular area of high tech vehicle manufacturing, this potentially leaves the consumer up a creek without a paddle.

Computer Malfunction or Not

Another emerging problem with high tech cars is the question of whether or not an accident is the fault of computer error. If your car senses something in the road and swerves the car off into a railing, because the onboard navigation and driver safety measures are engaged, is the company that designed these safety measures into place at fault? As the driver that gets hurt, you might be compelled to imagine the fault is in the design and resides with the company that designed it. What you may not realize is that a court could just as easily side with the company that designed these safety features and rule that the computer-based equipment was not operating in a faulty manner. If the accident involved a third party driver in another car, this could potentially mean that you, being the operator of the car, will be held fully responsible for what happens to the other driver even though the computerized safety system in your car is not found to be at fault.

As high tech car owners can begin to see, the basic driver safety course they took to become a better driver may not have prepared them for all the security and driving dangers their car could be used to commit. Every onboard computer and ECU within a hacker’s reach could be used to remotely access and take control of a connected car out from under its owner at virtually any time. This leaves many watchdog groups concerned with the security and safety of such vehicles to wonder if things have not already reached a point where high tech cars are out of control. Even consumers that trust that the manufacturer has a proper grip on their product would be shocked to learn that that is not always the case. This begs the question of not only how safe the car is when in operation, but also how the manufacturer can guarantee that the security of their high tech cars are not open to easy compromise by even an amateur hacker.