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by kkfx 1268 days ago
I know a connected car, as most modern cars are, can potentially be controlled from remote.

That means you can get OTA upgrades that 99% of the times will work flawlessly, but a day may do not, the day you are in a rush in the early morning.

Since most connected cars are de-facto owned by their vendor a potential breach or deliberate sabotage might brick ALL at once across the globe or in some specific areas/countries.

...

A modern car is a car co-piloted by a human and a computer. A local airgapped computer might have bugs, a connected one might have vulnerabilities. Be more scared about them.

In mere local safety terms I can say most cars I know are partially mechanical that means for instance your steering wheel can auto-steer BUT with (more than) a bit of force you can steer it mechanically even if automation completely fail. Similar the break pedal have some servo systems but still partially work in mechanical forms, so might became very hard to push but still able to break a bit.

The most dangerous common design I know are:

- impossibility to turn off certain ADAS who might act really badly in certain weather condition, like the classic ABS on icy roads;

- automatic doors lock when car move, NO DAMN WAYS to unlock them while the car still moving;

- manual parking break disappeared so a kind of emergency breaking ALSO usable by a passenger (for instance if the driver fell ill suddenly) ABSENT and no electronic replacement either since the electronic one if present refuse to engage if the car is moving;

- cockpit design that makes very hard/slow for a passenger to push the driver feet out of accelerator etc if he/she fell ill suddenly.

I consider the above as a sign of VERY BAD design, so I doubt those who made it can be trusted for anything else in safety terms...