[scottbez1]

This doesn’t seem that crazy to me - a broadly applicable coordinated OTA zero day applied across cars during US rush hours has the potential to result in likely hundreds of thousands of deaths in a few hours if safety critical systems like airbags can be tampered/inhibited by OTA-capable systems.

The scale of car travel plus the inherent kinetic energy involved make a correlated risk particularly likely to lead to a mass casualty event. There are very few information system vulnerabilities with that magnitude of short-term worst case outcome.

[viccis]

Sure but you could just nuke us too, given that the response to a mass civilian death event would be the same. Same reason the US would be foolish to destroy the Three Gorges Dam.

[beeflet]

It doesn't need to be a mass civilian death event. They can wait, collect data and kill 90% of our most important soldiers, heads of state, spies and everyone needed to maintain critical sectors of our economy. They could kill everyone who is anti-china. They could kill all the members of one political party (any one) as a false flag and cause a civil war.

Surveillance technology is nessisarially selective, so these "all or nothing" hypotheticals do not apply.

See also "slaughterbots". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU

[epolanski]

Nonsense, if that's the goal the countries are at war and you have to worry about nukes, not your car being switched off.

I'd expect HN crowd to be smarter than nonsense security propaganda, yet it seems to work.

[swolios]

There was already a million vehicle recall for a vulnerability that allowed remote control of safety features (steering/breaking/acceleration control) that could be abused by anyone with a sprint mobile sim.

https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2015/RCRIT-15V461-4869.pdf

[PaulDavisThe1st]

.... and the second US civil war starts up and one side has hacked into the automobile kill switches ...

"security" and "war" come in all sizes and shapes. Even inter-national warfare can be of the "cold" variety, in which nobody is nuking anybody else, but making automobiles randomly unreliable could be extremely effective (for a while, anyway).

[bflesch]

Not really convinced by your argument. If you want to achieve your scenario you just take a sysadmin from the Tesla shanghai plant and next time they go to the US HQ they gain access to a coworkers laptop and deploy an OTA update to the tesla fleet. And this is assuming that the Tesla OTA update deployment mechanism is actually separated between countries, and not simply accessible from the Tesla intranet.

No need to design & ship another low-cost car model for this.