I don't think the author is wrong about the threat. Unfortunately, his apparent solution--a government mandated standardized "safety module" to intermediate the

I don't think the author is wrong about the threat. Unfortunately, his apparent solution--a government mandated standardized "safety module" to intermediate the Internet-connected bits of the vehicle from the non-connected bits--is likely even more risky. Monocultures can be devastated by discovering a single flaw. And there are guaranteed to be many flaws in any non-trivial computer system. Imagine if a straightforward exploit for Spectre that totally compromised a system leaving a hard-to-detect back door via some simple Javascript had existed on January 1, and had been injected into a few popular websites via ad networks... for that matter, how do we know such a thing didn't happen?