Basically this is tech that lets cars communicate with each other. (This is in addition to self-driving cars the industry is working on.)
US road safety legislators have outlined a plan to demand all new cars and trucks be able to intercommunicate wirelessly, with the aim of reducing car accidents through a dynamically-evolving mesh network detailing location, direction, and speed. The Vehicle-2-Vehicle (V2V) scheme revealed by the NHTSA would not, at least initially, allow cars to react independently to potential dangers out of view of their human drivers, though future iterations of the system could well tap into brake-assistance, lane-guidance, and other technologies showing up in modern vehicles.
Quick video:
… Yeah, funny but not informative, lol. More detail here:
Just one more step until we’re driving automated cars like these:
As long as I can wirelessly send messages to morons on the road like, “I’ll rip out your esophagus” and “cut in front of me and I’ll stick a hot soldering iron in your dick hole”.
^ Your dream of being able to push a button on your smartphone and cause the idiot’s car to jam on it’s brakes or shut off the engine are getting close to reality.
I wonder how this would affect auto insurance? I mean, they are stating that reducing the number of accidents as a benefit of this, but this would change the whole game of writing insurance since you no longer have an 18 year old driver, phone in hand yielding a death machine that you can rate higher than a 30 year old with a full time job.
In preparation for next month’s Black Hat Asia security conference in Singapore, Javier Vazquez-Vidal and Alberto Garcia Illera have assembled a small electronic device that can leave a vehicle’s computer system open to attack. “It can take five minutes or less to hook up and then walk away,” Vidal says. It can also be built from off-the-shelf components for less than $20.
… they’ve wired the CAN Hacking Tool (named for the Controller Area Network bus it exploits) into four vehicles, and have used it to wirelessly manipulate lights, set off alarms, control power windows and even activate the vehicle’s brakes. By the time the conference starts, they hope to outfit the prototype with a GSM radio, making it possible to control vehicle’s systems from virtually anywhere.
“A car is a mini network,” Illera said. "And right now there’s no security implemented.
Toyota both brushed off Miller and Valasek’s work by pointing to the fact that their hack required physical access to the vehicle. “Our focus, and that of the entire auto industry, is to prevent hacking from a remote wireless device outside of the vehicle,”
They say they’re focused on wireless, but we’ll see.
I made a couple posts in the nerd section on this topic…
It’s possible on some cars to insert a malicious CD with MP3s on it crash the application that plays music and get arbitrary control over the PCM/CAN BUS
Bump. Honda installs a “smart intersection” in Ohio:
The technology is called “vehicle-to-everything,” or V2X. The cameras, which can pick up emergency vehicles, pedestrians in the walkway, and potential red-light violators from about 100 meters, or one city block, and warn drivers who can’t see them from around buildings and other obstructions
