Of course if you position a powerful instrument directly in front of the car and flood the car sensors with powerful signals, it is bound to get blinded. What's the big deal?
How is this even hacking? Any sensible hacker worth their reputation should be ashamed of this.
This is like throwing a boulder on the path of a car - any car - and claim it has been hacked and the car crashed.
Say you hate uber and they have a lot of autonomous car, with a device ( that now is big and cost a lot, but of course we are planning for the future ), just jam the sensor and you are done. a lot of uber car crash and maybe you can kill someone, just for the fun of it..
The point is: it's good for tesla and other to consider some malicius attempt and consider that if the camera fail it's probably better to stop the car ( fail = laser jamming ), and that if you find the radar has a noise level too high someone is trying to put you out of the road, and so, it's better to stop and not ignore the fact that someone is trying to do something nasty.
Or you would prefer that your car in this case goes stright off the road or hit a big object?
I would say that someone could also try to paint the road in a way that point directly out off a cliff, and see if they can kill someone in this way when the car is full autonomus.
Yes, it's oblivius, it's not a "ohh you are a great hacker", the point is show the weak point of the system, be it a non firewalled port or a simple jammer
p.s. if you simply put a boulder in front of an autonomus car, the car stop itself. if you don't have enought time for stop, then it will at least slow down. but if you put something in front, and the car doesn't stop.. then you have a problem.
