If they don't give root, researcher may have incentive to keep vuln secret for root access. Looks reasonable.

Having shell is extremely handy for further discovery. SO handy that if they were just gonna patch the bug and lock you out, you would simply not disclose it.

It's a mixed bag. This only applies to the infotainment system and not the autopilot computer.

They've also revoked certificates from researchers personal cars in the past

> Researchers who find at least one valid “rooting” vulnerability will receive a permanent SSH certificate for their own car

It feels like this is something you should get by being owner of the car, and not have to do free speculative research for the manufacturer to get it.

Diagnostic Trouble Codes?

I'm sure you're an expert, pro at everything.

Yes.

Most modern laptops no longer use LVDS for connecting the screen, but they use eDP (embedded DisplayPort).

So LVDS is more likely to linger in automotive displays, while in less obsolete devices it has been replaced by either eDP or by MIPI DSI (used e.g. in smartphones).

SpaceWire is also just LVDS with an uber-minimal routing protocol. It runs on a lot of satellites.

From messing around with these units from various cars, which often need more enablement than these, sometimes it’s nice to just know your interpretation of the wiring diagrams isn’t at fault when chasing down “no lights at all” issues.

Cars usually consist of multiple harnesses -- as it is in this case as well. The harnesses are the cables in a car. That is the part you can purchase because that is the part.

There's a list of them here: https://service.tesla.com/docs/Model3/ServiceManual/2024/en-...

Mostly depends on how fast you want to charge.

That's what I figure -- but it was wild to read that after reading the part about component-level PCB repair lol

Yeh, it seems odd to have the cut off cables, the wiring information...and then to go and buy a loom rather than bodging a cable at that point.

Tesla treated the service manual like congress treats certain recently surfaced files.

Tesla also went to a 48v wiring harness in some of their vehicles to allow them to power more equipment with less copper. It might be one reason why they use nonstandard connectors, so people don't attempt to hook 12v equipment to the system and also the higher voltages might require connectors rated for it.

Now they just have to take the next step and have everything in the vehicle running on PoE.

Yes I am. Thankyou for recognising that

I wasn’t criticizing them.

There's a reason that John Salvatier's 'Reality Has A Surprising Amount of Detail' blog entry is so evergreen on this forum.

People tend to overestimate their knowledge of other disciplines.

I have worked with a LOT of PHD's in recent years. Their code leaves much to be desired.

It's called misplaced confidence and it isn't exclusive to software engineers. Doctors, engineers, presidents... The list goes on.

I don't know, I've had more non-technical people and trades try and mansplain bullshit they don't understand than tech people have.

I spent the last week successfully reverse engineering my car / various scan tools to get the right information to diagnose a fuel pump problem (and to do so without the incredible awkwardness of many of the tools)

It's pretty amazing what Claude + Ghidra + knowledgable coaching can accomplish. It was basically just setting direction, setting up an incremental workflow with the right kind of documentation, and questioning some of its theories and assumptions from time to time.

I'd love to release a lot of it but I'm torn between releasing artifacts created with expensive software I paid for and thinking that many of those things should really be freely available to anyone (specifically the things which definte the protocol to talk to the car and mapping of what various things are reported vs what they actually mean.

Not saying there's anything wrong with your perspective (lots of terms get in muddied waters, it's common and not a problem if everyone is on the same page), but this is what I just found on Wikipedia:

"Early on, the notebook computer and LCD vendors commonly used the term LVDS instead of FPD-Link when referring to their protocol, and the term LVDS has mistakenly become synonymous with Flat Panel Display Link in the video-display engineering vocabulary."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-voltage_differential_signa...

>then I needed to find a brake controller that can work with the higher voltage (14.4v vs the normal 12v)

Put a voltmeter on the battery terminals of a regular car at 2000rpm and note the voltage. You'd be surpised (the alternator can produce as high as 15V on some cars).

> But then I needed to find a brake controller that can work with the higher voltage (14.4v vs the normal 12v)

Not understanding this sentence. Most running ICE vehicles product closer to that 14.4 than 12v. I think a standard controller would have worked fine?

Keysight == Hewlett-Packard Old School.

Ha! Reading this comment made me curious, so I went back and looked at the article and there does seem to be a full sized HDMI connector. I wonder if it is enabled, or just for Tesla internal testing?

Wrong. They’ve always been open, even with their patents too. All free to use, no royalties

The passenger side kick panel or behind the glove box are two very common places for vehicle computers -- some cars have them under the hood, which I always thought was a bad idea.

Consider whether this is an uncharitable comment --- someone with little expertise in a discipline has made a rookie mistake and didn't realize that the wires weren't produced individually.

Professionals overestimating their knowledge is a very common thing!

> Software people tend to overestimate their knowledge of other disciplines, writing it off as "easy" or work beneath them

You should see what happens when someone involved in the sciences, e.g. Chemistry, gets their hands on Claude Code.

What a rancid comment. The first thing you can think of when seeing someone earnestly sharing their learning process, is to insult them of being vain.

In Canada we generally call it the sleeve, or the wrap.

I always like to point out that Germans don’t, in fact, have a word for everything.

It’s just a phrase or sentence with spaces removed.

Knowhatimsayin.

Wait, why wouldn’t you post it/ write it up?

The cable in the article is pretty much doing the same conflation of terms that Wiki is talking about - the automotive one is a proprietary cable that carries some protocol that uses LVDS as its signalling, so at the most basic level both it and the display cable in the laptop are 'LVDS cables' but that's also the most generic term that gives you no information about the protocol actually being carried by the cables.

Just dump it in a gist. That your of knowledge should be free

And as we all know, if you're smart enough to get root access, your neighbours children playing football in the street should be subject to the risk of you driven a car that claims to have full self driving with custom code on it.

Imagine having to hack your device, then having to submit a request to actually own it.

That’s quite a weak confidence in their own platform security if finding a root level vulnerability is not one-off event, but it’s a program expected to have multiple people routinely finding those.

Yeah I saw that too which is why I posted my comment, it's surprising to me :) LVDS for display cables was an incredibly term in that context. Even still is sometimes despite them mostly being eDP (embedded-DisplayPort) now, which is quite incorrect hah

Automotive transients can be wild. I did a bringup with a board that had specified 100+v range specified for transients and finicky quality requirements on the output. The power supplies took up most of the (very large) board.

I typically fault anything above 15.6V as “that’s a bit high, your alternator might be on its way out” when working on automotive / caravan / camper van appliances and accessories.

The underlying tension is that "you own the car" means something very different from "you own the software running the car." Tesla treats the firmware as licensed software rather than property you can inspect and modify. The bug bounty program is a PR-friendly way to say "we support security research" while keeping full control over who gets access and under what terms.

Right-to-repair legislation is chipping away at this but slowly. The EU's right-to-repair directive covers physical repair and doesn't really touch software access. The real test would be a regulator taking the position that restricting root access on hardware you own constitutes an anticompetitive tying arrangement, since you can't use the car's data for your own purposes without going through Tesla's APIs and paying their fees.

John Deere has been the main battleground for this argument so far. Farmers can't repair their own tractors without paying for dealer access to diagnostic software. Tesla is the same pattern applied to consumer vehicles, but the consumer advocacy pressure is weaker because fewer people feel the pain directly.

As much as I tend to agree philosophically, could it not result in people making changes that endanger other road users?

Normies get scammed on Discord into pasting commands into their browser console.

As a pedestrian I prefer for most people to not have root access to their multi-ton fast-moving killing machine.

You can feel that way, but plenty of car configuration has always been locked away and walled off, and manufacturers make a tidy profit selling software licenses to dealers and mechanics to perform basic diagnostics. Proprietary software is big business what can you do.

You can translate that to corresponding car-purchases, i.e. vote with your wallet.

The interesting part is this implies that Tesla cars have static certifcates that don't rotate. (Whoops.)

Yeah, I expected some gigantic writeup about tricking it into thinking all other systems are connected to it but maybe it's made this way so it's easier to repair without needing the whole car

You really must be new to this, huh? Expensive software that you paid for?! Claude? Yes, the question is whether you want to share knowledge that cost you literally nothing, and will bring humanity one microscopic step in a better direction - or not, feeling superior in that only you have access to that knowledge. You have a choice!

It's exactly the same. Why would it be different?

+1 on the "plz tell me how" train!

Sorry, what are you talking about? Just release it? Are you talking about trying to make money off it? Are you claiming you reverse engineered ecu tuning software you paid for?

Haha, don't forget your wristbands.

i wonder if usb-c next to is like these diagnostic ports on Dell servers?

You are probably right. Surprisingly the first controller I tried didn't work. I assumed the voltage was too high since it worked in my other (much older) car. I found a reference online of people that tried a particular brand/model and that's what I went for. Thankfully my car isn't the model with the internal 18v battery.

It's only a debug port and not actually HDMI signaling, unfortunately.

Confidently incorrect.

https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/utivlj/tesla_s...

> This used to cost $3187.50

https://driveteslacanada.ca/news/tesla-service-manuals-free-...

> The access story has been inconsistent over the years. Tesla has opened up free access to both the service manuals and diagnostic software in the past, but that was apparently a mistake, and loopholes were quickly closed.

https://www.teslaownersonline.com/threads/tesla-service-manu...

"Always ... all free to use". Not so much. And before that, even less available.

I will grant you for number 2, there seems to be some ambiguity - some people claimed it was only if you needed to actually use their diagnostic tools, because Tesla wouldn't sell them to anyone at the time (which is also in contradiction to your "everything you need, all free, always").

If you'd like the cursed location for a vehicle computer, have the Smart fortwo's SAM. It's the fuse box!

It's also notorious for having awful solder connections and failing outright.

https://evilution.co.uk/mod/sam-unit-solder-repair.htm (and Aging Wheels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8AAleKR33Q)

Fair, but software engineers are especially known for this. There was an XKCD about it

https://xkcd.com/1831/

Try working on a software project as a non-developer and see if you still respond so negatively to their sentiment. I can’t tell you how many times developers tried to arrogantly and dismissively explain design principles to me, as an experienced, degree-holding designer, because they skimmed a whole Tufte book at some point.

I was a developer for a decade before I went to school for design, so I’ve seen it from the other side. It’s not all bad: that overconfidence can lead people to tackle problems they’d abandon if they really understood the domain’s complexities. But often it presents like developers acting like their genius developer brain allows them to solve difficult problems in completely different fields with a few glib analogies and a few brief thought experiments.

In German that's called Wortbildungsfähigkeit, or in English, WordStructureCapability

Cars are moving towards something like that, mostly because copper is expensive and there are miles and miles of it in even a basic car these days

14v is not a transient, if your voltage was 12v with the car running, there's something wrong with the charging system (DC-to-DC in an EV, alternator/generator in an ICE)

13-14v is normal in all 12v automotive systems as the charging voltage

Just put it online somewhere

you're correct. a '12v ICE' alternator generates up to 14.8-15.2v. Most automotive stuff can operate between 9ish-16ish-v , of course totally depending on the product.

of course this is just a modern interpretation. older stuff runs at 6v and some weirdo offbeat cars have a 24v/48v rail sitting around somewhere. Cop cars often had alternators that put out weird voltage ranges for certain equipment, or dual 12v for high amperage output.

My RAM truck with the Cummins diesel engine has the engine computer mounted on the engine block. You'd think the heat and exposure to the elements would make that a bad idea, but I suppose Cummins knows what they're doing.

What happens?

He's right about the rest. We software people can definitely be annoying.

I'd understand either of those, but I'd go with "tubing"

https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/c/electrical/wire-cable/tubing...

Cell phone/laptop repair shops.

I read somewhere that the reason they don't typically use IT networking cables / tech is because normal IT infrastructure is a lot less strict with things like packet loss. It's actually not a huge deal to drop packets here and there, especially if any given component is at capacity. But in a car, some devices are super chatty and you can't be dropping packets much at all.

That said, I'm sure there's gotta be a better way to solve it with less copper. And I think they did something like that with CyberTruck.

LVDS with Fakra connectors is pretty standard in automotive for cameras and displays. The protocols used over it are often proprietary though.

Incredibly what?

And eDP is a differential signal at 200 or 400 millivolts so I don't see how that's "quite incorrect". It's not "the" LVDS but it's still in the category.

Saw up to 800A on units like the FSD for the short time until the caps were full. Slow starting a SoC is a software problem, slow starting the Cs and keeping the impedance low at the same time a non-trivial hardware problem.

Well it's a selection bias.

If an athlete breaks a world record, they're likely to do it again. Even though it's incredibly hard to break a world record.

For static voltage sure. For short term resilience against static electricity these units typically are specced to endure 2kV on each pin.

Voltage isn't the whole story, controllers also need to survive current spikes and power transients, and Tesla's rails may not look like generic 12V gear.

That's super cool, I'm currently struggling with scan tools for a 1999 Mercedes E300 Turbodiesel. I had one that worked OK for about a decade (Autel something or other) with a 38pin connector, but it recently bricked itself with a message like "connect via USB to Updata" which I assume means its firmware somehow erased itself. Cannot figure out how to "updata" it, doesn't seem to connect via USB, the Autel software runs under Wine but doesn't appear to recognize the device... gave up and bought an iCarsoft device which sorta kinda works. It can talk to every module except for the ECU (Bosch MSA 25.1 I believe?) however if I tell the device that my car is a different model (1995-1997 naturally aspirated) I can blindly clear ECU DTCs, which is good enough because this thing is barely more complicated than a toaster. All that is to say, this space is ripe for some open hardware/software love.

Or Agilent, at some point in between

It's on GitHub, but I want to avoid Tesla DMCA-ing it

When I’ve brought atypical stuff in to be repaired at one of those shops they have been absolutely willing to solder whatever, however they did have just one “soldering guy” for every shop in the metro area who only came as needed. So just keep that in mind if you’re in a hurry or want to talk an atypical task through with someone. Probably call ahead.

> ...in a car, some devices are super chatty and you can't be dropping packets much at all....there's gotta be a better way to solve it with less copper.

I know CAN is a thing for a while now, and in the aviation world they have ethernet-derived standards like AFDX etc. But for some reason cables abound.

Meh, even in the IT industry cables abound.

I would love to lobby to change how the law works for these cases: for some definition of "firmware" (informally "software that ships with hardware and is not intended to be selected by the consumer like a computer operating system"), add a copyright exception so that modifying the firmware in situ is treated like modifying the physical hardware, because in practice they are in fact the same thing: a single component that does a single thing.

With this, the John Deere approach to gatekeeping vehicle repair would no longer be legally protected by the DMCA or by copyright law. All the other protections afforded by copyright law would still apply: you cannot rip the firmware off the hardware and distribute it, the manufacturer is under no obligation to help you modify it, etc.

However, tools which patch or circumvent antifeatures of the firmware would now be legal to use on hardware you own: it would be legal to patch out software locks, retune engine computers, etc.

>> Tesla is the same pattern applied to consumer vehicles

No i'd push back on this because the entire workshop manual is available for free without even registration required. You can literally google and land in the relevant sections and it is of a far higher quality than ford, VAG or bmw as three examples i'm pretty familiar with. I haven't seen the John Deere stuff.

Tesla does have "special tools" for some repair procedures, a practice as old as the auto industry but they don't rely on them to the same extent as BMW for example. Anecdotally, the special tools i'm aware of are genuinely useful - for example, the tool for disconnecting seatbelt anchors saves time vs the traditional bolt - where special tools on other marques are often clearly to workaround a failure of packaging or engineering resulting in tight access for a regular tool.

Their online API access is a little bit annoying, or at least unfriendly to casual home user, specifically the workflow to register an OIDC client, but not insurmountable.

Tesla absolutely does not apply the same patterns as John Deere. Everyone can fix Teslas. Parts are easy to obtain. Never had issues with them. John Deere on the otherhand is the absolute evil of right to repair.

Tesla’s manuals are all online and many of the parts sell for cost plus. You may be thinking of Ford and Toyota

Definitely not always. It used to be that a mechanic or a skilled owner could tune, modify, repair or replace absolutely anything in your car. That was basically since the invention of the car, up to somewhere in the 2000s. And even then, various hackers and pirates made sure almost anyone could get their hands on the software. In fact, many mechanics these days use 3rd party software because the manufacturer refuses to sell them their version or even that version doesn't have all the features.

That kind of thing is always the stated justification but never the real reason.

Almost invariably when that excuse is trotted out, there are are usually many things that are much more common that are also far more dangerous. For example, texting while driving or driving with bald tires in the wet are both 100x more dangerous than anything almost anybody would do by modifying the car's software.

I had a car with an all wheel drive computer in a similar spot in the late 2000s.

I had a small crack in the rubber seal around my sunroof from parking outside in the elements. When it rained, water seeped in, made its way down the a-pillar, pooled under the seat, and fried the computer.

Expensive fix but I was able to drive it to the shop.

It’s because when placed inside the engine bay, the large wiring harness is shorter, which is not only cheaper, but also shorter wiring helps with the consistency of electrical timing and reduces noise.

The specs say no less than 6volts. In the real world when the temperature drops down to -70F or colder and batteries get old the voltage goes well below that: deal with it.

I work with a bunch of PHD's and have been since before ai coding.

Their code is aways terrible, and they constantly think it's good.

The exercise is always the same: explain the math to me, like I'm 5, then we profile it and see what is faster.

Oddly Claude Code, integrated into their IDE's has made this situation happen much less.

I never want to work in a place again where the fun way to start the Monday meeting is a "math problem".

PS: Don't even get me started on their SQL.

This sounds rather similar to the form of scientific fraud where you first create a conclusion, then invent/manipulate the data until it supports your conclusion.

Yeah, on the Cummins the ECU is mounted on the intake side of the engine away from the exhaust and turbo and toward the front right under the fuel injection pump so it gets lots of cooling air.

This thread is interesting to me 'cause I'm also a software guy and recently took a job dealing with building fighter jets and the amount of engineering going into the wiring and computers on those things is insane. It's been a very interesting learning experience.

That is the recent (and gradually worsening) situation but it is not in and of itself a justification. Effectively you're saying "it's currently this way therefore it's okay for it to be this way".

Manufacturers have increasingly restricted control over products as they've gradually been digitized. Prior to the digital era anyone could do anything to personal property (regulations notwithstanding ofc); more expensive items typically came with circuit diagrams for the purpose of repairing them.

Why can't they rotate ? having root ssh keys on the device doesn't imply the certs don't rotate.

Not necessarily. All they have to do is roll a pub key into the update package. Same as any OTA update.

My read of the output in the post when they tried to SSH to the device was that Tesla are actually doing the right thing here and using an SSH certificate authority, which allows issuing certificates signed with a private key authorising access to a subset of devices (optionally for a defined period of time). https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSSH/Cookbook/Certificate-b... has more information, but in summary unless the private signing key is compromised in some way this is entirely legit. I'd hope that they also have some mechanism for distributing a new public key if the signing key does get compromised but who knows.

Not sure about your specific car, but a lot of the “consumer friendly” options like OBDeleven, Carly, etc are fantastic. You often have to pay, but a lot of work goes into them and they often just work.

Interesting...1999 is probably a bit early for that Bosch to be running one of the usual ECU update protocols like UDS. It sounds like it's in the bootloader and looking for a valid executable. So the FW updater is likely in the bootloader.

If you can open it up and find the JTAG pads, it should be simple-ish to use a JTAG reader to dump the image and then you can figure out the update protocol from that. It's unlikely to be complicated.

I remember getting that era working. I concluded Mercedes was trying to be clever in making a protocol so complex nobody else could understand it (thus ensuring you had to use a dealer) - and then discovered they couldn't debug it.

each body model (nothing to do with year or style) was different so clearing dtc but nothing else is not a surprise.

i did get that working, but I last touched it in 2007 so I don't remember enough details to be helpful. good luck.

If I recall correctly, a fully charged lead acid battery has an open circuit voltage of 13.6V.

So the alternator has to put out at least something higher than if it’s planning on recharging the battery after 500 to 700 amps have been pulled from it for a few seconds to start the engine.

>The underlying tension is that "you own the car" means something very different from "you own the software running the car."

What does that mean? "The software" is a specific configuration of the hardware you own. How can you own the hardware and not the specific copy of whatever data is on it? Note that I'm not confusing the copy of the data with the IP rights to it.

> "Tesla is the same pattern applied to consumer vehicles"

It really isn't. Unlike John Deere, Tesla is actually pretty good on right-to-repair. All of their technical and repair manuals are available for free to anyone. The service/diagnostics software ("Toolbox") is also available to anyone, albeit for a (not entirely unreasonable) fee.

(There is also a service mode built in to the car which can do many basic diagnostics for free)

> Tesla treats the firmware as licensed software

This would be okay if there's a way to reject the license and install my own firmware.

I don’t think that’s the reason, seeing as a car is already endangering everyone around it by existing. More likely about keeping the tooling to diagnose issues proprietary and expensive.

Four 9/11s worth of people die every year from drunk driving. If we can't even get that under control, I don't see why being able to modify your own car is a big deal.

> The underlying tension is that "you own the car" means something very different from "you own the software running the car."

How is this different from the 2000s, or the 90s, or even before, when the normal thing to do with commercial software was to purchase a license to use said software and a physical medium containing a copy? You'd also then not "own the software", but you owned the right to install a copy on your own computer and use it. That worked without having to hand over the keys to your own computer.

Sure, the physical delivery medium is gone, but that's just a detail. Why do we now think that just because we license software for use, we can't be in ultimate charge of our own devices?

Agrred, but it is remote root access is the danger, they already have root access to the physical dangerous things.

No, one can do that anyway. There is basically no real way to stop folks from modifying their cars. It can be made more difficult, sure.

This is about selling tools and access. It's another profit pipeline for car OEMs.

> Whilst cranking, an ICE car will drop to around 6 volts (then maximum power is extracted according to thevenim's theorem).

> That means all computers etc will work at 6v.

Not necessarily all of them. Plenty of stuff will drop out while cranking; hopefully not the computers that run the fuel injection and ignition, though.

Really? Which car manufacturer officially provides you a root access to your vehicle?

> All that is to say, this space is ripe for some open hardware/software love.

There's just so many computers and what-not in modern cars that this is a very tall ask. You'd need a project on-par with HomeAssistant to get anywhere.

{Keysight, Agilent, Avago, HP, HPE} are/were all HP

Yeah, max CV charging voltage is ~14V, max charging C rate is ~0.2C, open circuit voltage at 100% is that 13.x range. And lead acids like to stay at 100% unlike Li-ion which likes 50% +/-30%, so "12V" ICE cars just use a bus voltage of 13-14V and wire the battery there. At any given moment, the car's "12V" bus voltage MUST be above 13.x and below 14.4(absolute max).

It's a bit perplexing that those lead acid systems are referred to as "12V" systems when that figure is effectively the 0% voltage, whereas 3.7V for single Li-ion cell is the 50% voltage.

e: also, ICE transients can be in kV range, coming from ignition mechanisms. I've heard that you can literally measure engine RPM by selecting 1/dt on an oscilloscope and dividing that by cylinder count.

Interesting. I now know why my windshield wipers quit for a sec when my vw auto stop/start kicks back on.

Because American courts have entertained utterly moronic claims for decades now and the DMCA eliminates any sanity in consumer rights around IP products.

When you bought a DVD, you didn't "Own" the movie, but you had a legal right to do things with that data you didn't "own" anyway, like format shifting and selling that physical object on to another person. You could copy that data off and do things with it. I think technically it would be a copyright violation to then put that movie file into Movie Maker and cut up your own personal highlight reel, but good luck finding a judge willing to hear that case if you don't upload it to youtube.

Now, thanks to the DMCA and courts being absurdly credulous of bullshit arguments from corporate attorneys, you no longer have basic consumer rights. If you try to even inspect the code that runs to protect your literal life, that can be a crime. You own the literal hardware, but if you try to act like you own it, that's a crime. You technically still have the right to format shift a BluRay for example, but bypassing the math protecting that data overrides that "right" and you are guilty of a crime. A CEO's wet dream.

If the DMCA was older, IBM could have prevented the existence of the Clone PC market and ensured a locked up market. We would all be stuck on absurdly shit hardware because that's what was more profitable for IBM.

Pre-DMCA, Sega was told that their trademark rights were overridden by the innate market right to interoperate with their product. IP rights used to be fairly weak! Sony could not prevent a company from selling a software product that ran playstation games. To this day, Nintendo simply pretends these court cases didn't happen.

This is part of why China has so much success in manufacturing and product development IMO. They don't need to develop purposely worse versions of things just so some other company can sit on their hands for 20 years collecting rent. If you want a fast moving market, the ability to lock things down for 20 years is fundamentally unacceptable, only enriching a few owners, and outright harming our country. Basically every time in history that IP rights are weakened or nullified, you see a burst of development and advancement in products and solutions.

You could screenshot this and put it under the definition of “perfect being the enemy of good”

Obviously, they are both very good reasons. Just because you don't like one of them, doesn't mean the other one doesn't suddenly exist anymore.

Isn't this largely a US problem?

Enforcement is abysmal for stupid reasons. Courts are reluctant to remove the ability for people to drive because America purposely made itself dependent on cars, and cops are reluctant to actually arrest a lot of people for drunk driving because they tend to be buddies, or worse. You can find plentiful examples of off duty officers trying to get out of drunk driving simply by being a cop.

This is what you get when you can vote on the sheriff and judges who insist they are "Tough on crime" because they sentence a dude smoking a joint to years in the joint while ignoring real problems like, you know, murder and theft and violence and all the shit their buddies are doing. The "Tough on crime" people are the ones drunk driving often enough.

It doesn’t have to be a “big deal” for the powers that be to resolve that you shouldn’t have root access to your iPad on wheels, dude.

We could do both…

Disabling alertness sensors might worsen drunk driving actually.

Not a car engineer, but those motors can be pretty high A, so this could also just be a feature that helps the starter get as much power as it can while cranking.

You'd be required to jump through the hoops to get your custom firmware approved by the necessary regulatory bodies, just as Tesla did for theirs.

It's not really feasible for a private owner, so I can see why it's not offered as an option.

> All of their technical and repair manuals are available for free to anyone.

That should be the bare minimum. Ford charges you 40 dollar an hour for it and unless you know exactly what you are looking for you will spend several hundreds on it.

Too bad ford killed their old site, the print form was unauthenticated and you could print the entire schematics to pdf if you knew the internal model number. Or do what I did and run a script to dump it to higher res PNGs.

Perhaps it is also about liability. Otherwise, we would have people installing OpenClaw on their Teslas.

In 1990 Ford couldn't turn off your Mustang because you plugged a TwEECer into the J3 port and screwed around with the tune. Best they could do was void your warranty and deny you further upgrades (i.e. tunes flashed as part of a recall or TSB).

These days unauthorized access tends to lose you effective use of the hardware you bought because the hardware requires software features to work and that software often unnecessarily phones home so if the OEM toggles a field in a DB somewhere you lose access to back up assist or whatever other fancy tech features that you a) paid for b) don't strictly need to have dependencies that phone home to work but do "because reasons".

That is blatant whataboutism. Stop performing mental gymnastics and accept that what you personally want is not what’s good for society as a whole.

Yeah, it seems like more modern technology has settled on standard protocols (maybe a naive impression--someone will shout at me if that's the case) but there's probably a very long tail of bizarre false starts if you want full coverage of models back to the early 90s when computers became more commonplace.

It’s almost like there’s no market for this because it’s a silly thing that practically nobody actually wants enough to vote with their wallet.

That, or no company wants to assume liability. In which case, go whine to your local representative. That’ll be hilarious for all involved.

The nominal range for automotive systems is 10-16v. If you are designing anything for automotive use that doesn’t work reliably in that range, you are manufacturing problems for people.

This. Most cars nowadays come with the so-called "smart" alternators that vary voltage wildly depending on the current driving conditions.

One minute you might be accelerating and the onboard voltage drops as the battery supplies most of electricity. Then, as you reach the crest of a hill and start engine-braking, the car frantically tries to convert all the available kinetic energy to electricity, raising the onboard voltage to quickly charge the battery.

If you're going to sell the car with the modified firmware, fine.

But at least in my jurisdiction, I can mechanically modify the car in any way I please, as long as it still has seat belts, brake lights, and bumpers of a certain height. It doesn't even still require a steering wheel; that's not specified in the law as far as I've been able to find. (Now, if I removed the muffler and made it louder than proscribed by law, I could be cited for a noise violation, but only at such a time as I womped on the gas and actually made the noise. The car itself being _capable_ of the noise is not, inherently, illegal.)

This blew my coworkers' mind once as I unplugged the passenger-side airbag while mounting a bunch of new stuff there. Apparently in some places, it requires paperwork and certifications just to unplug a connector? Weird.

Have a lawyer look up the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act for you if that happens. What Ford can do is legally limited.

Surely not if I certified that the car was never going to be used on the road?

Any chance someone ripped that old site? Do you remember the URL? I don't have a Ford, just always curious about this stuff.

Then why wasn't it a problem before? People have always been able to install aftermarket or possibly even hacked together physical parts. If there was liability you'd expect some sort of shield blocking access to, for example, the hydraulic system for the brakes.

As it turns out though blatant irresponsibility is quite rare (depending on your definition anyway) since people have a strong self interest in not endangering their own lives or wallets. It's similar for homeowners - many states explicitly carve out a requirement that insurance companies cover DIY modifications that are within reason and this generally works out since you have a strong vested interest in not destroying your own house regardless of any insurance policy.

It's not whataboutism, it's a legitimate question. How does it increase safety on the road to reject local SSH connections by a dumb user, when that same user can mess with the car physically?

Even as a well trained software engineer who works on transportation software including ECUs (heavy equipment not cars), I'm not sure there is much I could do with root. IF I had full source code to my car's radio I might try to add android-auto back in (it has android-automotive so I know it can do it), but if that isn't easy I'd probably give up. Without source code and a lot of time doing anything is impossible - as anyone else who works on complex software knows.

After 2006/2007 nearly everyone did CAN. I think that is even mandatory in the US, though I have no clue how to look that up (I assume there are details and exceptions) However before then everyone did their own thing. Often with custom chips that haven't been made since 2004 (or even 1999): good luck finding one that works if it breaks. CAN is cheap and allows a lot of power while hiding most of the protocol complexity. The things before that were often not as powerful as CAN, while being in practice a lot more complex because the complexity wasn't hidden.

Maybe 0.1% of consumers even know what "root access" means.

charm.li covers Fords and many other makes too up to 2013 ish. It is a pirate archive site holding workshop manuals for thousands of cars. Very useful. Very free. Long may it stay hidden.

More legitimately, alldata.com has repair data, workshop manuals for most marques up to today and will sell you either single vehicle (called "DIY") or a package aimed at independent mechanics where you can access anything. Same manuals either way, but you pay per vehicle with DIY (and have to contact support to switch.)

I use alldata for my GM truck, it is fantastic.

ETIS is dead and Ford finally pulled the plug, though since the current backend is some semi-custom IBM bloat I would not be surprized if you could get by that without too much hassle (took them three years to find out I was downloading all my car's travel and charging logs before they banned the dummy account, but now they track it and discontinued most of it anyways).

I won't go into details but searching around with the "forum" keyword and etis might get you somewhere (at least that did the trick a few years ago, now with LLM slop I don't know, and what the other person posted).

How does adding another way to cause safety issues affect safety?

Give me root access so i can install openclaw.

> Then why wasn't it a problem before?

It is. Thousands of people have died because of aftermarket headlights. Harder to assess, but probably much larger, is the number of excess deaths from nitrous oxide etc. emitted by modified cars.

People get killed by changes to exhaust, height (lift kits), bumpers (bull bars in particular), etc pretty often, though. And I can imagine software changes (exhaust is part of that actually) could kill people too.

Maybe you think daytime running lights are stupid and want to disable them for instance.

Simplest example: a driver could probably disable attentive driving checks by pasting a script in from a web search in a few minutes. Nothing like an inattentive 3750 lbs weapon.

There are about 3000 deaths per year in Sweden attributed to position from cars, and 300 physical accidents. So it is a really big issue, but it is almost impossible to make people understand that their car use and modification mains people.

Modified cars can release 1000x more polution, on streets with 800 daily cars that will have an affect.

Sure. Point is nothing has really changed. Largely there's no problem and to the extent that bad things happen it isn't something novel that's only just come up. It's not in and of itself an excuse to erode private ownership. If intervention is required then regulation should be passed deliberately by the legislature.

A driver could also install a little machine that turns the wheel slightly at regular intervals, to the same effect.

You can ban modifying your car to pollute more (which we do) without banning modifying your car.

This isn't complicated FFS.

The difficulty against this in the US is the unfortunate reality that the people coming to these shops to enable their stupid trucks to roll coal are the people who should technically be raiding and shutting down these companies. This can be fixed.

Physically, you can already modify your car to be controlled by a stupid program and that has been possible since at least the 90s. You can do the supposed harm by not being aware of damage to your exhaust system.

The solution to exhaust harms of ICE engines is electric cars, not a reduction in consumer rights.

I've heard multiple people claim an ankle weight on the steering wheel is sufficient for hands-free driving.

I dunno, I think there's a big difference between making digital modifications to software vs. making physical modifications to hardware.

The risk profile is very different and non-obvious to your average car owner.

It's the difference between trying to repair your leaky dishwasher vs. trying to repair the electrical panel in your basement.

Yeah and they could hire a professional driver or a engineer and IPO for billions a life sized driving AI powered crypto robot too. Look, like clearly google + ctrl-v scripting or running an one click deployment exe on your computer on a whim is different than physically ordering/picking up something and then installing it into a vehicle?

Well both of those examples could potentially electrocute you or start a fire and both can be done by a homeowner if he feels like it.

I don't disagree that it's a bit different in certain ways but I feel like that's drifting off topic. It shouldn't be up to manufactures to determine these things unilaterally but rather the legislature. Particularly any justification to the contrary rings hollow in this case because there's a very strong conflict of interest.

Of course they're different, but you're trying to argue that the former takes objectively less effort than the latter, and it doesn't. One or the other may take less effort depending on who you are and what you know.