This is not a good idea.
Cars are dangerous, and not just to their owners and drivers.
If you bought a car, how do you know it’s firmware hasn’t been fiddled with? How do you know they haven’t h4x0r3d the breaks for maximum drifting and minimum stopping?
How will auto-insurers be able to price your policy (which is based on the kind of car you drive) if the owner may have (possibly unintentionally) disabled the anti-lock brakes or the airbags? Will they start doing random firmware audits?
How will inspectors check your emissions when they know you may be able to turn the emissions control system on and off at will. I seem to remember some recent scandals with these kinds of firmware hacks which cost billions of dollars and maybe even (statistically at least) killed some people.
I like Cory a lot, I’ve bought his books and been to his signings, but I’m starting to think his ownership-centric view of these kinds of things is narrow-sighted.
The example in this kickstarter, making an electric car, sounds like a cute, fun project. However, it gets less cute and fun when you realize that an electric car which gets in an accident might have it’s batteries explode in an unnecessarily harmful way.
And in all actuality, I can’t think of any serious use for such a thing. It would be a fun project, but do you really want people driving their hobby-projects down the road at 70 mph past a school bus?
We have laws about what makes cars street-legal and I would highly support laws which make modifying your car’s firmware grounds for revoking its registration, or at minimum requiring special licensing.
Just imagine the dangers of reselling one of these. Computer engineers will tell you that designing safe, reliable firmware for real-time systems is a no-joke hard thing to do, are these hobbyists going to put their firmware through 10,000 hours of testing? How can consumers know their car’s firmware is stock and not riddled with spyware?
We should not normalize the modification of systems which have a broadly accepted convention of functionality and safety. It is dangerous to future users and nearby users.
We don’t want massive metal objects behaving like our fragmented computer ecosystem, with inconsistent diligence and shoddy implementations. It’s one thing for hacked up websites to leak user data, it’s another for hacked up cars to splatter brains on pavement.
