features on demand

4 Articles

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 113 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.

A black PCB with a cellular modem board piggy backed on top. It has a micro-USB and DB-type connector on the end facing the camera.

Open Vehicle Monitoring System Is The Window To Your EV’s Soul

January 25, 2024 by 14 Comments

Electric cars have more widgets than ever, but manufacturers would rather you don’t have direct access to them. The Open Vehicle Monitoring System intends to change that for the user. [via Transport Evolved]

As car manufacturers hoover up user data and require subscriptions for basic features, it can be a frustrating time to make such a big purchase. Begun in 2011, OVMS now interfaces with over a dozen different EVs and gives you access to (or helps you reverse engineer) all the data you could want from your vehicle. Depending on the vehicle, any number of functions can be accessed including remote climate start or cell-level battery statistics.

The hardware connects to your car’s OBDII port and uses an ESP32 microcontroller connected to a  SIMCOM SIM7600G modem (including GPS) to provide support for 3 CAN buses as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections. This can be particularly useful for remote access to data for vehicles that can no longer phone home via their originally included cellular modems as older networks shut down.

Do you wish EVs weren’t so complicated? Read our Minimal Motoring Manifesto.

Jailbreaking Tesla Infotainment Systems

August 5, 2023 by 22 Comments

With newer cars being computers on wheels, some manufacturers are using software to put features behind a paywall or thwarting DIY repairs. Industrious hackers security researchers have taken it upon themselves to set these features free by hacking a Tesla infotainment system. (via Electrek)

The researchers from TU Berlin found that by using a voltage fault injection attack against the AMD Secure Processor (ASP) at the heart of current Tesla models, they could run arbitrary code on the infotainment system. The hack opens up the double-edged sword of an attacker gaining access to encrypted PII or a shadetree mechanic “extracting a TPM-protected attestation key Tesla uses to authenticate the car. This enables migrating a car’s identity to another car computer without Tesla’s help whatsoever, easing certain repairing efforts.” We can see this being handy for certain other unsanctioned hacks as well.

The attack is purported as being “unpatchable” and giving root access that survives reboots and updates of the system. Since AMD is a vendor to multiple vehicle companies, the question arises as to how widely applicable this hack is to other vehicles suffering from AaaS (Automotive as a Service).

Longing for a modern drivetrain with the simplicity of yesteryear? Read our Minimal Motoring Manifesto.

New Cars Will Nickel-and-Dime You – It’s Automotive As A Service

December 30, 2021 by 230 Comments

Every few years, someone pushing a startup to investors comes up with an acronym or buzzword which rapidly becomes the new hotness in those circles. One of the most pernicious is “as a Service,” which takes regular things and finds a way to charge you a regular fee to use them.

Automotive companies just absolutely loved the sound of this, and the industry is rapidly moving to implement subscription services across the board. Even if there’s hardware in your car for a given feature, you might find you now need to pay a monthly fee to use it. Let’s explore how this came about, and talk about which cars are affected. You might be surprised to find yours already on the list.
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