My co-worker’s buddy used to build a couple Cobra kit cars every year – it was his hobby and he could usually sell them for at least 3x what it cost him.
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That’s awesome, and lucrative!
It’s nearly impossible to get a home-built car registered in this state (CA) unless it’s built on top of an existing chassis that has a previously-known VIN. The official rules can be found here but what they don’t tell you is that you don’t stand a snowball’s chance in San Diego of actually getting this process completed. I built an electric car from scratch a few years ago and ended up selling it to some other crazy dude because I couldn’t get anyone to certify the emissions (yes, on a car with no internal combustion engine) before CHP and DMV would sign off on the construction.
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Oh jeez! That’s terrible. So you took it to a smog place and they wouldn’t sign off?
You’re right. When you read those rules, they don’t sound all that bad.
There are still ways around.
With the SoCs, the nuclear option is removing the chip itself for an unlocked one, with custom bootloader. Cost: one SoC, one BGA chip replacement (I hate BGAs and if you don’t, you didn’t have to work with them - but there are reportedly some who like them, maybe it is an acquired taste).
For the signed data blocks with serial numbers, a possible workaround is a small cheap FPGA sitting on the comm line and doing a MITM on the data; when a request for the serial comes in, it responds with a fake, otherwise be transparent to the data. If too prevalent, a Chinaman can show up with hacked hard drives with rewritable serials.
Phoning home can be prevented or MITMed with firewalling tricks. There may be exploitable implementation bugs. If the machine can start without pinging the mothership, its access can be denied.
I guess the main attacks will go through the SoC/bootloader. If you can get the code in, whether by exploiting the enslaved bootloader or by physically replacing the chip with one with a liberated bootloader, you pretty much won.
It’s a shame we have to go through these routes to own our own devices. Corporations who do these shenanigans should get their headquarters firebombed and their execs beaten in dark alleys.
One day a Great Awakening happens and these bureaucrats will be hanged.
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That’s always been my feeling- the rules for the most part make sense, the rub is in how whichever flavor of bureaucrat interprets said rules.
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Hey, I just looked. Replicas of these are selling for 30k to 70k! Wowmazeballs.
That’s probably less than 1/10 of a real one…
I was just checking with my coworker… It was about 12 years ago when his buddy was doing that – since he got married and settled down, he only tinkers.
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This is my dream, if I can ever afford it. Good on you.
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One of these days, when I magically have money and space…
But I think I’d rather build a Caterham.
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Start small. You can always add on, …or sell, do something bigger & badder the second time.
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