[earhart]

It was, in hindsight, a lame attempt at a joke, based on Volkswagen's history with skirting emissions controls.

More seriously, it's hard to know what all's installed on your phone, and what all it's doing; car parts are intrinsically sandboxed.

It'll be interesting to see what happens when always-connected self-driving cars have enough compute power to run self-driving systems and people are free to install random apps without great security (because car manufacturers seem to be awful at that). I'm predicting cutesy weather apps that quietly mine crypto all night long...

[saagarjha]

A bad car part can absolutely cause your car to crash, much more than a malicious app on iOS, which may not even be able to access your photos or messages.

[zepto]

A malicious app on iOS can pose as something it’s not, and ask for your mom’s credit card number.

[gambiting]

So can a website, these sort of hypotheticals just seem like pure scaremongering.

[zepto]

Yes, definitely so can a website.

The whole point of Apps is that they are reviewed and therefore are safer than random stuff on the web.

It’s would be scaremongering if these kinds of threat were hypothetical, but of they are pretty widely known.