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Increasing complexity is not what's concerning here. Being able to adjust the ride height of your car (air suspension) is not that uncommon. My current vehicle
by dakrisht 13y ago
Increasing complexity is not what's concerning here. Being able to adjust the ride height of your car (air suspension) is not that uncommon. My current vehicle has adjustable air ride suspension for city/highway. It automatically drops an entire inch at speeds over 60mph to reduce drag and allow for a lower center of gravity. It's great.
The concerning issue here is someone hacking this vehicle's OTA software update and causing accidents. Or even tapping into the vehicle control system(s) and causing havoc.
Unlikely, but possible vs. current vehicle technology requiring a trip to a dealer by an authorized and authenticated trained tech to make these changes.
I imagine every critical system on the Model S is accessible wirelessly.
This actually bring me back to Michael Hastings accident where theories are floating around that steering, breaking and acceleration systems might have been compromised wirelessly causing the accident.
The bottom line is that there's simply way too much convenience technology in cars today and that might not be such great thing. It's a tough call as safety technology is important and the more the better. However, certain things such as OTA suspension and other critical system updates need to pushed and completed intelligently. I want to assume that any updates to these vehicles are done when they are off (overnight) and redundantly checked for integrity to ensure the update was successful.
- icelancer 13y agoDo you think Tesla has hired the best tiger/red teams in the world to break their systems? I would certainly hope so, but your comment does make me wonder.
- freehunter 13y agoI know they're two separate companies, but Elon likes to move technology from one company to another: I would hope that some of the same software QC procedures apply between Tesla and SpaceX.
- goatforce5 13y agoHere's (some of?) the Tesla Model S API: http://docs.timdorr.apiary.io/ http://docs.timdorr.apiary.io/
- MiguelHudnandez 13y agoI presume these APIs interact with Tesla's web servers and not a Tesla Model S directly. So the protocol the car uses to receive commands and firmware is likely different.
- timdorr 13y agoYes, that is correct. There are actually two APIs: A REST-ish car state and control API (a Rails app), and a streaming telemtry service (a Node.JS app). The car talks to Tesla's telemetry servers, which their API servers talk to as well.