> On my drive home I abruptly had absolutely no acceleration, the gear indicator on the dash started flashing, the power mode indicator disappeared, an alert said shift into park and press the brake + start button, and the check engine light and red wrench lights came on. I was still able to steer and brake with power steering and brakes for maybe 30 seconds before those went out too. After putting it into park and pressing the brake and start button it started back up and I could drive it normally for a little bit, but it happened two more times on my 1.5 mi drive home.
If that happened on the highway I could easily see people being killed.
On a reasonably well constructed car, loss of power steering at highway speeds is barely noticeable. Loss of power brakes is a different story. An inability to actually get all the way off the highway before running out of speed could also be quite dangerous, and a loss of power steering can indeed make it quite difficult to maneuver at low speeds.
I'm shocked (literally) to see there are production vehicles with steer-by-wire. Couple that with OTA updates and you have a vehicle I'd refuse to ride in, much less purchase.
Its wild to me that any car manufacturer would push an OTA update while the vehicle is in motion, or hell, even push one at all instead of having it be user initiated. They didn’t bother to put a simple check in place to make sure the vehicle wasn’t being driven before updating?
And then these manufacturers wonder why people just want them to have a dumb head unit with carplay/android auto. Because they absolutely suck at software and have shown no desire to improve outside of charging people subscriptions for hardware features that are already in the car.
It's impossible on my Tesla. You get a notice to install and a warning that you won't be able to drive for up to 45 minutes. You cannot click install unless the car is in park. You can always decide never to install an update.
This isn't exceptional design on the part of Tesla. It is absolutely baseline common sense. I can't believe it isn't the defacto rule. I guess it might need to be regulated because apparently some companies are THAT untrustworthy.
The Cybertruck is basically the only vehicle with true steer by wire. Infiniti offered cars for a brief time which had clutched steering columns (a truly baffling worst of all worlds solution). Otherwise what people mean is electrical power steering, where a power-off failure means you need to turn the wheel harder (a power-on failure can be very bad and there are a lot of safety systems to limit applied torque so a driver can always override the input).
If your CyberTruck is airborne something went very wrong.
One isn't the same as the other - the regulatory regime/testing and redundancies on a plane are completely different to a car and not inconsequentially the person operating the plane is rather better trained on what to do when things go "oopsie" than the person loose behind the wheel of the average car.
Also aircraft are serviced in a way far beyond what cars are.
I think most recently developed large commercial passenger aircraft are completely fly by wire with most controls lacking any physically interlinked backup.
Hopefully I am not too naive, but I think aircraft safety redundancy remains above retail car standards. Also, in aircraft they "have time to solve some problems", versus freeway bumper cars.
More to the point, FAS regulations would absolutely forbid any such event. They probably mandate testing of the updates before returning to airplane to service.
In service to the pun, there is a relatively famous demo of using erlang for embedded development where they show off hot code reloading of a drone's flight software while it's in flight.
Also people say "oh what if fly-by-wire fails" well what if traditional hydraulic controls fail, which has happened plenty in the history of commercial aviation
Everything can and will fail at some point
No redundancy is redundancy enough in some %0.xx of cases. You can always reduce the number, but never make it 0
I work for a medical device manufacturer, and software absolutely can be designed to be just as reliable as physical systems, but the development and testing process looks completely different than a developing a mobile app. Things slow WAY down: if you want to change one line of code, it'll take literally weeks before it makes it to a production environment because of all the testing, documentation, justification, and human approvals. I imagine flight safety systems are subject to a similar level of rigor.
"Richard Hipp: Getting that last 5% is really, really hard and it took about a year for me to get there, but once we got to that point, we stopped getting bug reports from Android.
"Richard Hipp: Yes, so we’ll do billions of tests."
Large planes are all fly by wire. In a commercial airplane, you're talking about moving maybe a quarter-ton of metal for the rudder alone, and against high wind speeds. There is no way to move those without powerful servo motors.
The (as of a this year) second-most popular airliner, the Boeing 737, has fully mechanical controls for the ailerons and elevator (with hydraulic boosting). Elevator trim is also mechanical.
The pilot needs to be built like a gorilla to fly it, but primary flight controls continue work, even with a total failure of all electrical and hydraulic systems.
I'm still stunned by Captain Haynes's grace under pressure:
Sioux City Approach: "United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, the wind's currently three six zero at one one; three sixty at eleven. You're cleared to land on any runway."
Haynes: "[laughter] Roger. [laughter] You want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?"
"The contamination caused what is known as a hard alpha inclusion, where a contaminant particle in a metal alloy causes the metal around it to become brittle. The brittle titanium around the impurity then cracked during forging and fell out during final machining, leaving a cavity with microscopic cracks at the edges. For the next 18 years, the crack grew slightly each time the engine was powered up and brought to operating temperature. Eventually, the crack broke open, causing the disk to fail."
The cybertruck steer by wire IIRC has dual redundant everything including power supplies (the redundant one is powered by a DC-DC converter from the HV battery)
Multi-version approaches to developing software aren't as good at reducing common-mode failures as many people expect[1].
[1] J. C. Knight and N. G. Leveson, “An experimental evaluation of the assumption of independence in multiversion programming,” IIEEE Trans. Software Eng., vol. SE-12, no. 1, pp. 96–109, Jan. 1986, doi: 10.1109/TSE.1986.6312924.
All the electrical steering columns designs I've seen have used redundant sensors (often groups of them) specifically for that reason. The physical steering wheel to the shaft is still a SPOF, but it's also a "dumb" part where the only failure cases are mechanical. Eliminating failures there is straightforward engineering.
Yeah, I should have spent an extra 10 seconds thinking of the problem here and I'd have realised you can have multiple sensors going to different software on one steering column...
> I'm shocked (literally) to see there are production vehicles with steer-by-wire. Couple that with OTA updates and you have a vehicle I'd refuse to ride in, much less purchase.
Indeed, the risk is far too large to ignore.
I will never own a car that has steer-by-wire or braking-by-wire. Those are two controls that absolutely must have a mechanical linkage that cannot be altered by software. Other things I can handle, but if all goes haywire, I must be able to steer and brake.
You might need to stop dealing with cars made recently then. While steer-by-wire isn't so common, the number of cars with entirely digital drive-by-wire throttles would likely bother you.
Honda: "all Honda models use Drive-by-Wire technology" (for the accelerator pedal).
While throttle/acceleration isn't steering, if you're uncomfortable with the underlying concept of a potentiometer and a microcontroller and a small motor on the other end being used to control a vehicle and consider it unproven technology, then you'd need to avoid most new cars in order to be logically consistent.
Well, at some point you won't have a choice. The government is going to ban ICE vehicles, tax the existing ones, and all the electrics will be everything by wire.
I for one cannot wait for my nuclear powered steering mechanism. The reactor is of course used to generate steam pressure to actuate the steering arms, the car is powered by normal batteries.
Not steer-by-"wire" exactly but in the 1970s and 1980s Citroën had cars with "DIRAVI" steering. In normal operation there was no direct mechanical link between the steering wheel and road wheels. The whole thing was a big hydraulic servo, with "resistance" applied to the steering wheel using a heart-shaped cam, a big spring, and a small hydraulic piston that had progressively more pressure behind it based on road speed.
If you let the steering wheel go it would spring back to the middle even with the car at a standstill because of the resistance cam.
If it lost hydraulic pressure while you were driving there was still generally enough in the system to allow you to pull over safely, and you could drive for much longer distances if you could cope with about a quarter of a turn of "play" in the steering wheel. With no pressure at all, turning the steering wheel would move the shuttle valve in the steering controller until it bottomed out and then the linkage would just turn the pinion on the steering rack, which was normally used for servo feedback. Uncomfortable, but acceptable for "get off the road" situations.
The hydraulic system also worked the self-levelling suspension, the fully-powered braking system (similar to the WABCO systems on a lot of more modern vehicles), and on some manual gearbox models the clutch.
Not really "drive by wire", because it's not electronic, but it really is a system where the steering rack could be fully decoupled from the steering wheel.
You are being downvoted and the replies so far aren't helping you understand why your statement is very wrong.
"Steer by wire" means there is nothing but copper signal wires between your steering wheel and the front wheels. Your steering wheel is essentially a video game controller.
This has nothing to do with the car's mode of propulsion though, and both EVs and ICE cars can have steer by wire controls. So far, it's only the cybertruck that has this paradigm, all other EV's all have normal power steering.
For normal power steering systems there are two types: hydraulic and electric. Both types have a solid steel shaft between your steering wheel and the front wheels. You can remove the engine/motor completely, and you'll still be able to steer the car. The hydraulic or electric motor merely helps you turn the wheel, nothing more. Hydraulic is being phased out for electric in both EVs and ICE vehicles.
Steer shafts are being phased out. Electronic power steering has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Manufacturers want fully electric, fully autonomous cars. If the computer is driving the car 99% of the time, they'll argue that having a steering shaft is totally unnecessary.
For whatever reason, manufacturers aren't trying to make fully autonomous ICE vehicles.
Driving forces could be interpreted as wrong, but they’re probably correct about orders and outcome:
Step 1 is policy/goal for California [1].
Step 2 decades old policy in Europe (and recently canceled in Canada?), as vehicle carbon tax. There’s also EV tax credits of course, which are practically identical, from the purchasing perspective - “If I buy ice, I pay this much more in taxes”.
I’ve really enjoyed it on mine. Steer by wire enables progressive steering. Having to turn the wheel over and over in other cars to maneuver in parking lots seems laughably primitive now in comparison.
I think there are only a couple of cars that are steer-by-wire.
The Infinity Q50, QX50, QX55 and QX60 (with backup that connects upon electric failure).
Without backup, but triple redundancy, can be found in the Tesla Cybertruck. But I'd take that redundancy with a grain of salt as they don't have the best track record telling you the truth.
That said, I really with companies would go back to the good old hydraulic steering. I don't need self-parking. But self-parking needs at least electric steering (with our without steering column).
I've lost power steering on my dad's F250 once. It was incredibly noticeable, since I had to crank the wheel like a ship from the age of sail in order to get onto the shoulder.
I guess you could argue that it wasn't a reasonably well constructed car.
I lost power steering every day during the winter in my old car, when the engine stalled while coasting through a particular intersection, and I was busy re-starting it and negotiating the turn.
It's amazing how much more reliable cars have gotten. You used to be always on the alert for some critical function to fail spontaneously, and also listening for warning signs.
I had flaky power steering on an old Lexus LS400, and it would stop working for minutes at a time, more or less at random. At 40mph, I could generally tell that it wasn’t working but there was no meaningful extra difficulty when steering. At 15-20mph it was quite a bit harder to steer. At 5mph, it took some real force to steer. At parking speeds, it was very hard to make the large wheel movements needed to park. At a full stop it was almost impossible.
In general, this wasn’t especially hazardous, since I rarely needed to move the wheel very far while moving at very low speed in a place where other cars could be a hazard.
(Yes, I got this fixed. And the old LS400 cars were extremely well designed and built.)
I’ve only used a tiller when I was learning to sail. Since then I’ve only used larger ships with a wheel as the helm. You’re absolutely right that a tiller is an order of magnitude easier still.
The amount you turn the wheel is identical [0] with or without power steering, unless perhaps you have one of the weird variable turn ratio systems. In a conventional power steering system, the steering wheel is linked to the wheels, and the power steering applies torque to help you turn the wheel but does not change the relationship between the steering wheel and the wheels.
[0] Almost identical. The steering has some flex, and the amount it flexes is related to how much torque you apply. But this is a tiny effect.
My comment was explicitly about how physically difficult it was to turn the wheel. I had to crank it over far as well, in order to get off the highway.
Losing power steering would be no big deal. Anything that caused a sudden loss in forward velocity worries me.
There's construction on the Interstate highway in my area with lanes that have no "breakdown" space ("contraflow" lanes). I would be terrified to lose power in that lane. I would be worried about getting rear-ended and / or causing a pile-up.
Lost power steering at highway speeds in my '91 Corolla a couple of decades back. Didn't notice on the highway (belt just made a loud pang and I thought "What the heck was that?"), but as soon as I took an exit and had to turn at the light, I seriously had to muscle the wheel over. Good learning experience about what power steering offers.
My assumption is that the HN audience is not perfectly gaussian distribution of the population but probably not extremely far from it.
So can someone who owns a modern car please help me understand why you would buy a car that has the mere capability to be remotely shut off?
A vehicle is a personal safety device, that allows for independent travel away from bad things and towards safe things. That is one of the most critical aspects of a vehicle.
Assuming that one of the most critical times you might need a vehicle is fleeing oppression, having a remote switch off as a possible vector to impede your escape is an existential threat and basically makes one of the core reasons to have a vehicle moot.
My assumption is that most people are not thinking about their vehicle as one of the most critical tools for freedom.
Having traveled the world and lived in war zones, vehicles are life savers and it’s insane to me that anyone would allow a possibility for someone else, specifically corporations and governments with major power levers, to even have the ability to stop that remotely.
> The only way I can think of is “don’t buy a car made within the last 25 years”
You don't need to go that far back. None of my cars have any kind of connectivity, the newest one is 2014. I'll never own a car with any kind of remote connectivity, the risk is far too large to ignore.
Yes. And I've structured a decent amount of my life around transportation independence.
My last car will probably be my current car from 2013, which I have replaced the engine in, and plan on replacing the transmission in when that goes, as well as other parts as needed. Rust is basically what is going to kill it and I can stave that off for a long time.
When that day comes, it won't really matter. I live near a quarter mile from a train station, 200 feet from a bike trail that connects to my city's bike network, and 50 feet from a bus stop. No need for a car really ever. Rentals exist for car needs every few months, but there are usually other options.
The key for me was to not be dependent on any singular mode of transportation and to have redundancy so that if any single option isn't working, I have at least one other option to go places.
I assume you joke here but large parts of the car enthusiast community are considering this strategy for near term. 2010s is widely argued to be era of "peak car" in terms of vehicles that are well built with minimal complex extras added for compliance with emissions and over the top safety regulation (less lane departure warning systems to turn off...).
My own group of car buddies, pretty much all we do is shop and trade 2010s vehicles now, rather than buy new.
Fair enough, though fwiw automobile makers seem to have taken note on the pushback to the touch screen controls, and 2025MY vehicles are actually starting to shift away from touch screens and back to physical controls again.
If one wants to buy a modern car, and one cares about preserving disconnected functionality, one just needs to research if there's a workable fallback mechanism.
Or, you know, deal with the 20mpg but a vehicle that will last until the heat death of the universe #2uzfeClub
FWIW while cars are essentially backdoored nowadays with all the cellular/OTA updates BS you can still disable it. I suspect this won't be an option in the near future, the way things are going.
I can't wait to see Hacker News comments in 2035 lamenting how they used to be able to "just use a bypass cable" to make their cars not phone home, by the time EVs and even general ICE vehicles have telemetry so deeply integrated with the vehicle it's impossible/illegal to be disabled.
It’s only a sophie’s choice if you’re really bad at math, if not you’ll take your chances with the kill switch thing that’s never been confirmed to hurt anyone over the thing that kills tens of thousands of Americans a year.
There is a UK company that puts engines with mechanical fuel pumps in newer cars. Particularly newer landrovers. £10k ugrade, and the last car you need ever buy.
So you exclusively buy pre-2000's shitboxes? Is there a reason for that, when you could literally just rip the modem out of a modern car instead?
If you're driving such old cars, I have to assume you're mechanically inclined. At which point, a simple bypass cable or literally just removing the telematics unit out of a modern vehicle should not be too much to ask for.
Bonus points for gaining moderate security with immobilizers that way, so any random guy can't just start your car with a set of wafer jigglers.
Don't buy modern cars. There is a real movement to keep driving cars from circa 2010. This was around peak car for me. You could still block off the egr valve, remove the cat and any dpf nonsense. No 'driving aids' to distract and infuriate me. No touch screens to distract and infuriate me. No software updates. Can still get over 50mpg. My car is going to keep being fixed as long as it is viable.
If I tested my emissions using UK MOT standards before and after removing the cat and egr, and showed both an improvement and a pass, would that still be problematic for you?
I am not sure everyone is speaking the same language here. A UK gallon is 25% bigger than a US gallon, so UK mpg is correspondingly higher. Also the testing is presumably different, so numbers measured in the UK are not comparable with US numbers even taking account gallon size differences.
I assume the questioner is asking about US mpg? The Prius was there for sure in US mpg (just, at 51mpg), not sure about others.
* The 2010 Toyota Prius had 51 mpg.
* Volkswagen Golf TDI Bluemotion (Diesel, around 62 mpg)
* Volkswagen Polo Bluemotion (also Diesel, closer to 71 mpg)
* Peugeot 3008 Hybrid4 (Diesel, around 68 mpg, some tests speak about 74 mpg when driven with some sense.)
> OK, I'll bite. Name 2 or more cars from 2010 that got better than 50mpg. I'll wait.........
Not 2010, which makes this so infuriating..
A 1986 Honda CRX HF was rated 51 MPG highway. That was an engine with stone-age technology, and it was possible.
Just imagine +40 years of incremental development with modern materials and modern engine control systems. What could a 2026 Honda CRX HF do in MPG if that development had been allowed to continue all these decades? Certainly above 60, probably above 80 MPG? Maybe above 100MPG.
Instead society is selling us 6000+lb monsters with worse mileage than back in the mid 80s.
Can you point me to the directive/regulation that states that? I am in the EU and I'm not aware of any such thing. I have two cars that are 2006-2008 models and I am not planning on replacing them.
There are EU-wide mandatory air quality standards that get stricter as time passes and that are being enforced through low emissions zones which practically make diesel cars illegal. This may not be the case in your country yet but it will arrive with time.
Regarding driving aids, some cities in my European country are looking to make them mandatory in the city centre.
Overall this is being done to keep poor people from driving.
My nearly 30-year-old Range Rover is fully ULEZ compliant nearly everywhere in Europe except Paris, because it can run on propane which only really emits water and warm carbon dioxide when it burns - no "smog", no NOx, no HC, no CO, none of that.
Annoyingly in post-Brexit Britain I need to wait two years until is *is* 30 years old to drive in ULEZ zones. It was fine until Brexit kicked in - yet another Conservative disasterpiece.
1. They don’t know that can happen. The salesman doesn’t point it out.
2. They figure all cars will be that way soon so why worry about it.
3. It’s never happened to anyone before so why worry about it.
4. We don’t know anyone who has ever had to flee from oppression in their car so why worry about it. And this is America, if that’s what we’re worried about we’ll stock up on ammo.
> So can someone who owns a modern car please help me understand why you would buy a car that has the mere capability to be remotely shut off?
In practice, getting t-boned at an intersection where I have the right of way is a much greater risk to me than my car getting shut off, so it makes sense to optimize for safety in the former case.
Like smart TVs, the only possible alternative is buying a 10 year old model on the secondhand market. Vehicles without these features have not been produced in a long time
Of course they're not mass-market and will be lacking on some other bullet point features, but if you really care about your TV not turning into an ad billboard in 2 years, they're the way to go.
Or never wire the tv. Thats what I did. Everything runs through my Apple TV (admittedly captured by my years of employment there) but could just as well run through a Kodi instance
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.
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.
> So can someone who owns a modern car please help me understand why you would buy a car that has the mere capability to be remotely shut off?
That’s not what is going on here. These cars are not being intentionally shut down remotely. Instead, a software update for some computerized components of the car was pushed down to the cars and installed with the owners permissions, but that update apparently has severe bugs that should have been caught by QA.
This is a distinction without a difference. Intentional or not, these vehicles were disabled remotely.
Even if the owner gave permission to install the update, I would strongly wager that they did not give concurrent permission for the update to change the behavior of the vehicle.
Of course, I sincerely doubt the EULA offers any way to separate those permissions; you are all in, or you are all out. Assuming that you even have an option to opt out.
And that’s exactly why these cars can never be trusted under any circumstances, ever.
if you really mean help you understand why and that wasn't a rhetorical exageration, it's not hard to understand.
Most people have a variety of things they are looking for in a car they want to purchase, and other factors are more important to them than this one, which they figure probably won't happen anyway. There may be few options that aren't updateable over the air, and those options don't meet their other criteria -- if they even get that deep into considering it, which they probably don't, they just aren't really thinking about it. But even if they did. you don't have the option of buying your perfect fantasy car. I'd like to buy a car with manual mechanical controls instead of touch screen controls, but there aren't that many options for that either, and they may not meet my other needs.
Realistically I would be cycling out of my city because if there was anyone else except me running from oppression, we would be all caught in the same traffic jam.
I happen to live on the outskirts, but there are several choke points where it would be really easy to set up a barrier. Those choke points apply to cars mostly.
Lots of child comments mention fleeing oppression as being something outside the norm. A more relatable thing to flee for Americans might be hurricanes and wildfires-- both of which sizeable numbers of Americans have had to flee somewhat regularly.
Same reason people buy most things these days: convenience. Do you own a cell phone? It can be remotely updated (and even shut down by malicious actors), yet most people own one and don't think twice about it.
> So can someone who owns a modern car please help me understand why you would buy a car that has the mere capability to be remotely shut off?
Because afaik, all the modern cars have this as a 'feature', but there's lots of other nice features they have.
The best of both worlds right now is an earlier modern car where the 2g/3g modem can no longer connect to the outside world. Even better if you can pull the modem, but they're usually up behind a lot of trim.
Don’t even have to push a button nowadays. That convenience is apparently worth the risks. It’s really nice to not have to have keys or worry about turning the car off or on.
> why you would buy a car that has the mere capability to be remotely shut off
One answer to this I would presume is: there are no other new cars for sale without this flaw.
Why there aren't regulations or forced options in the market without these functions (as well as with physical control knobs instead of touch surfaces) is a good question too. There is huge demand for cars without most of this nonsense, yet I don't see that demand being met.
I doubt anyone wants a car whose infotainment system can be improperly updated to cause catastrophic power and engine failure while driving, if given this information and a choice to avoid it.
The more cynical/conspiratorial among us (myself included) have come to the conclusion that this demand isn't being met because powerful people want it this way.
Wouldn't it make sense to keep your prepper car in the garage (next to the welder) and low-mileage? Use the one with fancy electronics as a daily driver and hope the revolution doesn't happen during your commute.
They must given they can react to vehicle speed or prevent access to things while driving etc. I always imagined that to be a fairly hardened API that not even I, after a drunken bender, equipped with Electron, could cause any harm with.
Hmm. Would it be a read only API or can infotainment ever effect change to the vehicle’s operations? My Forester’s vehicle settings (eg. modifying the autonomy features) are managed by the crappy screen behind the wheel rather than the nice touch screen.
I suspect it did happen on the highway for some people, that would explain the disabled Jeep sitting on the (minimal in construction zone) left shoulder of an expressway that I drove past yesterday. I just figured there'd been a fender bender in the already terrible construction traffic and the second vehicle hadn't moved on yet.
It did happen on the highway to my sister. She was in the middle lane but luckily had the space to get to the side. Managed to start it again and get off the highway where it did it again and wouldn’t start after that.
> On my drive home I abruptly had absolutely no acceleration, the gear indicator on the dash started flashing, the power mode indicator disappeared, an alert said shift into park and press the brake + start button, and the check engine light and red wrench lights came on. I was still able to steer and brake with power steering and brakes for maybe 30 seconds before those went out too. After putting it into park and pressing the brake and start button it started back up and I could drive it normally for a little bit, but it happened two more times on my 1.5 mi drive home.
If that happened on the highway I could easily see people being killed.