[eridius]

Poking around an unknown device's network and sending arbitrary commands to see how it responds could certainly very well damage something.

[threeseed]

So could poking around the physical components of the car.

But people are well within the right to do so.

[Maxious]

On page 53 of the "Adventures in Automotive Network and Control Units" paper there's a photo of what happened to the researchers garage after a command to run diagnostics on the brakes left the vehicle unable to stop even at slow speeds http://illmatics.com/car_hacking.pdf