[luminiferous]

From the original 2015 article about the hack:

"Miller and Valasek’s full arsenal includes functions that at lower speeds fully kill the engine, abruptly engage the brakes, or disable them altogether. The most disturbing maneuver came when they cut the Jeep's brakes, leaving me frantically pumping the pedal as the 2-ton SUV slid uncontrollably into a ditch. The researchers say they're working on perfecting their steering control—for now they can only hijack the wheel when the Jeep is in reverse. Their hack enables surveillance too: They can track a targeted Jeep's GPS coordinates, measure its speed, and even drop pins on a map to trace its route."[1]

The wheel control only working in reverse kind of makes sense. They're probably using some kind of self-park feature to control the wheel, and some engineer (sensibly) put in some kind of interlock to prevent the wheel from moving on its own when travelling at speed.

The wording of the article implies that these particular attacks only work when the car is travelling at low speed, but earlier in the article they did mention that they could (and did!) throw the transmission into neutral while the Jeep was driving on the highway. The driver was unable to recover without turning the car off and back on again.

In a followup a year later, they showed that they were able to do these attacks at any speed, including turning the steering wheel.[2]

[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...

[2] https://www.wired.com/2016/08/jeep-hackers-return-high-speed...