NHTSA to require vehicle to vehicle communications
- Thread starter Jackl1956
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AnOutsider
S532 # XS27
- Apr 3, 2009
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I saw this, and my initial reaction is positive. I've always thought if cars could act in a hive mind like state, accidents could be avoided and traffic alleviated. This goes hand in hand with self driving cars IMO.
brianman
Burrito Founder
- Nov 10, 2011
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mitch672
Active Member
Oh no, what will we do when our cars become self aware? Maybe they'll all just leave us, as in "her", of course by then humans will have forgotten how to manually drive, or who knows if cars will even have steering wheels/pedals/windows to manually drive them.
Yea, I can't wait until people start hacking the system. Don't like the guy tailgating you? Send an event that an emergency stop is happening from your car causing his to slam on the brakes. There is no way they can properly secure this if every vehicle will participate.
Hacking the system to do that will most likely be illegal. On top of that, your car would have it's own sensors. So at best, your car would slow down a bit to keep some distance briefly. Then speed up when it sees no breaks. It will then report this data as a bug for evaluation and the guy doing it goes to jail. Though initially, the system will only give drivers warnings and that is it.
Chickenlittle
Banned
physicsfita
Member
I drove one of the test vehicles in this study for a while. I really liked the alerts for a vehicle in your blind spot. I miss that now that I'm driving my regular car again.
Fair enoiugh. So let's say I want to be malicious and just send out a signal to completely stop all traffic on a major interstate?
ElSupreme
Model S 03182
While saying "Emergency Brake" might not be considered a protected first amendment speech (like fire in a crowded theater). But sending out truly wrong and distracting information could be defensible with the first amendment, so long as you are not trying to cause a situation where someone may become hurt.
mnx
2013 P85
Where is your imagination? If I were to "hack the system" I'd tell all cars in the left lane to pull over. 
dhanson865
Active Member
More likely that it'd force you to tailgate to save fuel and allow more cars on the roadway, of course this requires full autopilot level systems. When I think of these sorts of systems I think most people would think of it as tailgating compared to the distances we like to keep now.
gjunky
Trifecta: Solar and both cars are EVs
I can see the benefits of the connected car but how easy would it be to track every car's position with this? Not to be too much of a conspiracy guy but do we really need to help the intelligence services?
Well first of all, they can make modifications of the system illegal. Similar to how the telecommunications act made esn cloning illegal for cellphones. Second of all, they can still pin you with reckless endangerment, obstruction of traffic and etc.
Because triangulating you through your cellphone or car's internet connection is somehow more difficult?
gjunky
Trifecta: Solar and both cars are EVs
Well, anyone that hacks the system is not going to go through their own car. They're going to go through someone else's that's been compromised.
In the example given, you are being tailgated by another car. The only way to make them stop tailgating you is if you use your car to send a signal. If your talking about hacking their car and sending such a signal, you would first have to get their identification number and then hack them. Doing that while driving is a bit tough, maybe with a second passenger. Though overall, I don't think hacking these systems would be easy and even harder hacking someone else's remotely. What they could even do is make the system read only with no remote access and any updates would be a hardware replacement of the modular computer system. Then hacking would be impossible.
Now you can hack the cloud system. but it is only a matter of time till you get caught. And since there is no money in it, professional hackers are not going to risk going to jail over stopping some tailgating.
Spoofing wirelss devices is incredibly simple. You could make a phantom car or multiples that don't really exist.
When the car realizes that it was inaccurate, you can have the car take a picture and identify the license plate of the car not matching the signal. So again they would get caught. Now multiple cars might be a bit tricky because how would they spoof the direction of the signal? Especially if they put antennas on each side of the car and make them directional. And say hypothetically they do, when your other sensors notice that they would report it.
On top of that, if each car has the unique identifier built into the hardware of the car. And the signal is sent encrypted, then decrypted at the cloud, you would have no way of spoofing it. Even if you somehow did spoof it, there would be authentication and the system would realize that a car exists in 2 places at once. Which again would trigger a flag.
At end of the day, the effort would not be really worth it.
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