[simonbarker87]

Thoughts from my wife who has worked in electrical and software for OEM automakers (high volume, luxury sport and start up) for 10 years: (I’m typing while she is, ironically, driving our Volvo)

To answer your last question first, buy a car that hasn’t been launched within the last 12 to 18 months. That’s not software specific, that general vehicle safety across the board as they will be working through the initial warranty issues. So if you are looking at second hand and you know model ABC was launched 2016, don’t buy one made in the 2016/2017 period.

ISO 26262 rates every system on a critically rating, if they have a ASIL rating of C or D they have multiple back up systems in place. This falls under functional safety which is a newer (5 years or so) area targeting that cars are now highly complex interconnect systems linked with software - the idea being that you target specific subsystems to make sure their function isn’t totally taken out due to some failure or error in the wider system.

Cyber security wise there is an EU reg coming in from 2024 making sure that OTA updates are safe, reducing hacking attack vectors and the like. This is being introduced to new cars and designs as a result of the issues cited above.

As far as people hacking in via the infotainment to access the car control systems - there are firewalls between infotainment and primary car control to mitigate against that issue. There multiple networks in a single vehicle to isolate systems so that no one central unimportant system (infotainment for eg) can take out the whole vehicle.

Software in cars to this level is new, it’s evolving and it takes 7 or so years to create a new platform. This means there is a lag in the system, especially during this transitionary period.

However car makers take this stuff incredibly seriously and their software teams are absolutely not run in the same way as a lower consequence dev situation. Lives are on the line and the type of devs who work in this field know that.

Nothing is perfect but the safety downsides of an old car are widely considered to be far greater than the threat of hacking or bad code in a new car.

[simonbarker87]

Follow up to this:

The one thing that could cause a lot of problems for cars and software is Agile/Scrum.

The projects that are being run in this, new for the industry way, are always late and people hate working on them.

CEOs and other C suite people see the massively shorter lead times that software can offer and are getting greedy. They saved a year or more of time on a feature thanks to code and over the air and then they decide they want it made in 4 weeks, when 3 months would be prudent.

There’s something about the intangibility of software that makes traditional automotive people’s brains break.

Thankfully many rank and file engineers and PMs in OEMs are pushing back against Scrum etc so a more pragmatic layer of management will come up in the coming years. Sadly Agile/Scrum will cause some preventable issues in the meantime.

Unlikely to be safety critical stuff due to the rounds of QA and safety council sign offs and gateways they need to go through. But less safety critical stuff may slip through.

[maerF0x0]

> There’s something about the intangibility of software

actually I see this break most managers' brains. In my experience it's been a constant pressuring to reduce scope such that the plans of the incompetent tend to be selected over those who know how to build great software with all the non-functional requirements in place (security, reliability, operability, modularity/flexibility etc) .

[phkahler]

>> The one thing that could cause a lot of problems for cars and software is Agile/Scrum.

Nobody in the industry is doing Agile for safety critical systems. The development standards are getting such that writing automotive software is not fun any more, but that is the correct way to go.

Want to electronically open the frunk on an EV? That piece of hardware and software has a surprising level of safety concern. Because inadvertently opening the latch can kill someone.

You are correct to be concerned, but the industry is very much on top of things.

[aeonik]

Cybersecurity is relatively new to the industry in a formal sense. I worked on helping the industry define SAE J3061 as detailed here. https://www.sae.org/standards/content/j3061_201601/

ISO 21434 came out a few years later. https://www.iso.org/standard/70918.html

This was all kicked off after the Jeep Hack. https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...

Overall the people in the field working on security these days seem to be excellent to me. They have crypto experts, kernel experts, and pretty good standards.

Before the Jeep Hack, they still took it seriously, but it was a lot of roll your own crypto types, and they didn't really know what they were doing.

Since then all the automotive companies hired and purchased companies from the traditional Cyber area and have trained up hybrid automotive and cybersecurity experts.

They still aren't perfect, but nobody really is, but cars these days have pretty cool tech in them.

If you are worried I'd recommend trying to hack your own car. You can learn a lot from it, and there are a lot of cool things you can do. In my experience, nothing alleviates fear better than a deep dive into a subject.

comma.ai for example have built an open source self-driving platform from hacking on the internals of vehicles. https://comma.ai/

[mimiminimi]

For those interested, the EU standard mentioned here is the the UN standard 156. https://unece.org/transport/documents/2021/03/standards/un-r...

The industry has also recently seen the introduction of ISO21434, cybersecurity engineering standard for road vehicles.

[userbinator]

Nothing is perfect but the safety downsides of an old car are widely considered to be far greater than the threat of hacking or bad code in a new car.

"widely considered" by the same industry who would love to sell you a new car...

[simonbarker87]

I take your point but my definition of new in this case is "something under 4 years old or so" - basically a newer car. So you can totally buy a second hand car.

[uconnectlol]

> Lives are on the line and the type of devs who work in this field know that.

That wasn't enough to prevent the Uconnect disaster of a bug that only existed because they sold out on two occasions: when ECUs were invented (green and performance marketing), when smart crap was bundled into cars (smart being a word that universally means ostensibly convenient but in practice even layman consumers hate it).