Comment by sjducb
7 months ago
You’ve got me thinking. I drive a Chinese made EV. If China ever had a nuclear war with the west they would definitely brick all of the cars they’ve sold us. Also it doesn’t have to be China that issues the command. Remote shutoff of cars is a great cyber warfare target.
I’ve looked at the fuse box for my car and found the fuse that powers the Ariel Module. Removing this fuse breaks GPS and all cellular connectivity. Hopefully it breaks automatic updates. I am tempted to leave it disconnected to see if my car skips an update.
The rest of the car works fine. If the political situation heats up then I can remove this fuse to isolate my car from the internet.
Some people connect a toggle switch in place of this fuse so they can leave the car disconnected from the internet when they are not using online functions.
I would be surprised if simply removing a fuse voids my warranty.
Not sure about the warranty effect, but on many other vehicles there are also bypass cables for the telematics units that allow you to physically remove them entirely from the car without losing any functionality (well, other than the online functionality obviously).
In my case, I'll gladly take potentially voiding the warranty on a car that almost certainly has it expired anyway, over being surveilled and monitored by the manufacturer so my usage habits can be reported to insurance companies.
Disable brakes and set acceleration to max, on all of them simultaneously, would have rather bigger impact than switching them off.
Doing it intelligently through an automatic OTA update that waits for the user to be in a difficult scenario would be much smarter.
Bonus points for adding a time-based kill switch so this feature gets pushed out months in advance, just to ensure everyone with such a vehicle has this malicious update installed.