car hacks

468 Articles

A dark warehouse contains a number of large blocky objects. A Tesla Model 3 sedan sits in the center with flames underneath and curling up the side away from the camera. A firefighter on the left side attempts to put out the fire with a fire hose.

UL Investigates The Best Way To Fight EV Fires

February 26, 2025 by 51 Comments

While electric vehicles (EVs) are generally less likely to catch fire than their internal combustion counterparts, it does still happen, and firefighters need to be ready. Accordingly, the UL Research Institute is working with reverse engineering experts Munro & Associates to characterize EV fires and find the best way to fight them.

There is currently some debate in the firefighting community over whether it’s better to try to put an EV battery fire out with water or to just let it burn. Research like this means the decision doesn’t have to fall on only anecdotal evidence. Anyone who’s worked in a lab will recognize the mix of exceedingly expensive equipment next to the borderline sketchy rigged up hacks on display, in this case the super nice thermal imagers and a “turkey burner on steroids.” The video goes through some discussion of the previous results with a Chevy Bolt, Hyundai Kona, Ford Mustang Mach E, and then we get to see them light up a Tesla Model 3. This is definitely one you shouldn’t try at home!

While the massive battery banks in modern EVs can pose unique challenges in the event of an accident, that doesn’t mean they can’t be repurposed to backup your own home.

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NEMA Releases Standard For Vehicle-to-Grid Applications

February 22, 2025 by 70 Comments

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) has been hailed as one of the greatest advantages of electrifying transportation, but has so far remained mostly in the lab. Hoping to move things forward, the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) has released the Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE) Power Export Permitting Standard.

The new standards will allow vehicle manufacturers and charger (EVSE) suppliers to have a unified blueprint for sending power back and forth to the grid or the home, which has been a bit of a stumbling block so far toward adoption of a seemingly simple, but not easy, technology. As renewables make up a larger percentage of the grid, using the increasing number of EVs on the road as battery backup is a convenient solution.

While the standard will simplify the technology side of bidirectional charging, getting vehicle owners to opt into backing up the grid will depend on utilities and regulators developing attractive remuneration plans. Unfortunately, the standard itself is paywalled, but NEMA says the standard “could put money back in electric vehicle owners’ pockets by making it easier for cars to store energy at night or when turned off and then sell power back to grids at a profit during peak hours.”

We’ve covered some of the challenges and opportunities of V2G systems in the past and if you want something a little smaller scale, how about using a battery that was once in a vehicle to backup your own home?

Bosch Starter Motor Freed From Mercedes Prison

January 24, 2025 by 79 Comments

Vehicle alternators are interesting beasts. Produced on a massive scale, these electric machines are available for a minimum of cost and contain all kinds of great parts: some power electronics and a belt-driven generator are generally standard fare. This generator can also be used as a motor with only minor changes to the machine as a whole, so thanks to economies of scale it’s possible to get readily-available, powerful, compact, and cheap motors for all kinds of projects using alternators as a starting point. [LeoDJ] noticed that this starter motor in a modern Mercedes had some interesting benefits beyond all of these perks, but it took a bit more work to get up and running than a typical alternator would have.

The motor, built by Bosch, can be found in the Mercedes E200 EQ Boost. This is a hybrid car, but different than something like a Prius in that it doesn’t have an electric motor capable of powering the car on its own. Instead it uses a combination starter motor/alternator/generator to provide extra power to the engine during acceleration, increasing efficiency and performance. It can also charge the small battery bank when the car slows down. Vehicles that use this system need much beefier alternators than a standard car, but liberating it from the car means that it has much more power available than a typical alternator would.

There were a number of issues to solve, though. Being that the motor/alternator has to do all of this extra work (and that it came out of a car whose brand is known for being tedious to work on in the first place) it is much more complicated than an off-the-shelf alternator. [LeoDJ] has been able to get his to spin by communicating with it over the CAN bus, but there’s still some work to be done before it goes into something like an impressively fast electric bicycle.

Thanks to [RoganDawes] for the tip!

Game boy with custom cartridge mounted on car dashboard

A Game Boy Speedometer, Just Because You Can

January 15, 2025 by 8 Comments

From a practical standpoint, [John] may be correct that his recent creation is the “world’s worst digital dash”, but we’re still oddly enamored with the idea of using a Nintendo Game Boy as a digital speedometer. Pulling it off meant interfacing the handheld with the vehicle’s CAN bus system, so whether you’re into retro gaming or car hacking, this project has something to offer.

Showing real-time vehicle speed on the Game Boy sounds like it should be relatively easy, but the iconic game system wasn’t exactly built for such a task. Its 2 MHz CPU and 160×144 pixel dot-matrix screen were every kid’s dream in 1989, but using it as a car dashboard is pushing it. To bridge that gap, [John] designed two custom circuit boards. One interfaces with the Game Boy, intercepting its memory requests and feeding it data from a microcontroller. The other processes the CAN bus signals, translating speed information into a form the Game Boy can display. [John] used inexpensive tools and software to read the CAN bus data, and used GBDK-2020 to write the software in C. His video goes in great detail on how to do this.

Months of work have gone into decoding the Game Boy’s data bus and creating a schematic for the interface board. Tricking the Game Boy into thinking it was loading a game, while actually displaying incoming speed data. The screen’s low resolution and slow refresh rate rendered it barely readable in a moving vehicle. But [John]’s goal wasn’t practicality — it was just proving it could be done.

Want to dive deep into the Game Boy?  Have you seen the Ultimate Game Boy talk?

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Self Driving Like It’s 1993

January 4, 2025 by 20 Comments

In a stunning example of the Baader Meinhof effect, we’ve recently heard several times this week about events like the “carbage run.” That is, a motoring event where you can only buy some garbage car to compete. In the case of [Robbe Derks], the idea was to take a six-day journey to the polar circle in a car. But not just any car. It had to be at least 20 years old and cost less than €1000. That wasn’t hard enough for [Robbe] and friends. They also decided to make the car self-driving.

If you have a car that is new enough, this might not be as hard as it sounds. The OpenPilot project adds L2 self-driving features to about 275 car models. But probably not a 20-year-old junker or, in particular, a 1993 Volvo 940. [Robbe] took up the challenge and is doing a series of blog posts covering how it all worked.

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A black and white line drawing of a vehicle interior showing the dashboard and. steering wheel. On the infotainment screen, the words "Selected Ad" are emblazoned in large letters.

Will You Need Ad Block For Your Car?

September 24, 2024 by 115 Comments

The modern web has become difficult to navigate without ad blocking software. Ford now has a patent application that would bring the ads we hate to your vehicle’s infotainment system. [via PCMag]

Ford has already replied to criticism with the usual corporate spiel of patents not necessarily being the direction the company will go with future products, but it’s hard to imagine that other automakers aren’t planning similar systems since they’re already charging extra for heated seats, EV range, and performance. Bringing ads to the captive audience of your personal vehicle and targeting them based on listening to the occupants’ conversations would be a new low. Maybe you’ll be able to pay an extra $100/month for the “ad-free experience.”

Instead of taking advantage of the EV transition to make better, simpler cars, automakers are using their highly-computerized nature to extract more from you and provide less when you drive off the lot. Enshittification has come for the automobile. Perhaps auto executives should read A Few Reasonable Rules for the Responsible Use of New Technology?

The first step of blocking these ads will likely be jailbraking the infotainment system. If that wasn’t enough, locking features behind a paywall has come for wheelchairs too.

Boss Byproducts: Fordites Are Pieces Of American History

August 28, 2024 by 17 Comments

Some of the neatest products are made from the byproducts of other industries. Take petroleum jelly, for example. Its inventor, Robert Chesebrough, a chemist from New York, came upon his idea while visiting the oil fields of Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859. It took him ten years to perfect his formula, but the product has been a household staple ever since. Chesebrough so believed in Vaseline that he ingested a spoonful of it every day, and attributed his 96-year longevity to doing so.

Well, some byproducts can simply be beautiful, or at least interesting. On that note, welcome to a new series called Boss Byproducts. We recently ran an article about a laser-engraved painting technique that is similar to the production of Fordite. I had never heard of Fordite, but as soon as I found out what it was, I had to have some. So, here we go!

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