Have you ever driven a Tesla and rebooted it while driving? Have you ever even driven a Tesla at all? Or is this just a guess based on your experience with custom ICE cars?
In the rebooting state it's probably still safer than any other car. You aren't missing any critical information that you can't see by looking out the window (the approximate speed). There is no gear shifting, no fuel, and you would have been warned well before this if your charge was low enough to cause alarm. I can really think of nothing you need on the screen that you would seriously miss as a matter of safety while it's rebooting for a few seconds, as long as you're being attentive as a driver, which you should be.
My point is that the actual risk to life and limb from this attack is very low because in the vast majority of situations you can easily and safely get off the road without instruments, and indeed that's exactly what you should do if your instruments fail. If you think that point is out of context where I wrote it, then we will have to agree to disagree.
What? I don't understand how this is relevant at all to my post. Why do you think I am calling something out of context? What do you think we disagree about? You need to explain what you think I said, because I have no idea if it's something I actually said.
Let me summarize my point of view again, very simply:
You are allied with userbinator in saying that it is not "perfectly safe and drivable", despite the quibbles about exactly how it fails that test.
Especially because you're saying "It's safe assuming you won't keep driving it." and they're saying "If you keep driving it, it's not safe.", and both of those can easily be true at the same time.
Or you could stay on the road and the reboot will finish in a few seconds. Meantime you have full control of everything as normal through the wheel and pedals, just no screen. It's like driving any other car where those dials are so small you can't read them and they might as well not exist, except that it's back to normal in seconds.
I mean, practically speaking, if the instrumentation in my car fails I'm getting off the road ASAP without checking HN to see how long I have to wait for everything to come back. My point is that the risk is low.
Or have a car who's physical gauges are not crashing, so you always know what speed you're in. I'm pretty sure cars in Europe always need to be able to show what speed you're going in, otherwise you won't be able to control your speed.
"the approximate speed" is not good enough. I challenge you to go on the highway without looking at the speedometer for 30 minutes and guess what speed you're driving in. I don't think a lot of people know what the speed would be, unless they regularly train it.
Where are people getting a few seconds from? The video seems to display the crashed MCU for well over a minute. 30 minutes is unreasonable, but it does seem like the safest thing to do is pull over.
Once the hacker has crashed the MCU of the software (an old version you can't get any more) then it's up to the hacker how long they let it sit there in a crashed state. They could leave it there for hours or days, if they wanted to. I mean the car is in Park.
So, it doesn't make any sense that you are talking about the time starting from when the crash was induced by the hacker, to the time when the reboot finished. You must be talking about what all the above comments were talking about, which is the time to do a reboot.
Well, it was probably a hard reboot. Which can only be done while stopped and with foot holding the brake down. And which takes longer than a soft reboot. So how long was it, exactly, since you claim it was well over a minute?
I checked the video to see what you could possibly be talking about.
The reboot starts at 2:09. The UI comes back at 2:24, which is being conservative... we could easily call it 2:23. 15 seconds. For a hard reboot. Again, soft reboots are even faster.
So, yeah. Saying it took a minute or more is a wild exaggeration. Fifteen seconds.
During these 15 seconds you are missing out on the ability to see your speed, which was shown continuously in the largest font at the closest part of the screen right up until the moment of the reboot. (Except in this case the car was in Park, so it's super odd that anyone would worry about driving safety here). And you miss out on the ability to open the trunk, the frunk, and the charge port. And the ability to look at maps. And possibly voice commands. I don't see any safety issue here. If this bothers people, they can just refrain from rebooting their MCU while driving. And if they really do get hacked, just look at the screen, note the speed, and reboot. Soft reboot should be fine, and can be done while moving or not, it's up to the driver, free choice. Don't like rebooting while driving? Fine, pull over. You don't need to though. Fifteen seconds. Tops. Of not having your screen. Soft reboot probably more like ten seconds.
This is how people form mistaken opinions about Teslas. Lack of personal experience, ignorance, presupposition of facts that do not exist, gullible acceptance of anything you read or hear, and exaggeration of perceived problems to a bizarre level.
I was referring to this video where the car is driving 60mph down the highway, and the MCU stays crashed for over a minute: https://www.youtube.com/embed/UkhwRUaSCA4
> Well, it was probably a hard reboot. Which can only be done while stopped and with foot holding the brake down.
If this is true, then it seems like it is impossible to (hard) reboot the MCU while driving? So they definitely should pull over.
> This is how people form mistaken opinions about Teslas. Lack of personal experience, ignorance, presupposition of facts that do not exist, gullible acceptance of anything you read or hear, and exaggeration of perceived problems to a bizarre level.
You seem to be letting your Tesla fanboy/girlism blind you. I'm not "forming an opinion" about Tesla over this event, simply arguing that should this happen to you the safest and best thing to do is pull over. I would do the same thing in a normal (non-Tesla) car should the speedometer or other important part of the dash fail in those.
Soft reboot should work. I think leaving it crashed for 60 seconds was up to the discretion of the user. He never tried soft rebooting. Of course not, since it was a demo of the hack. But soft reboot would be my go-to thing here and I would also at the same time start looking for safe places to pull over just in case the soft reboot didn't fix it.
But yeah this is an annoying hack if it hits an average driver. I'd say whether it's dangerous or not depends on how the driver responds. Just as you say, if any important part of the dash fails, the actions to take are largely the same as for a regular car, except I'm adding that there is that additional option of the soft reboot, in the meantime, which may fix it completely before a pullover can even happen.
If they are not aware of soft reboot, they should just drive safely and pull over to call service to ask what to do. If they don't do this, it's just like anyone in any car driving with something non-functional; the responsibility falls on the driver.
>I'm not "forming an opinion" about Tesla
OK, fair enough. If not for you, it can stand as a general comment about the nature of comments often seen in discussions about Tesla.
>otherwise you won't be able to control your speed.
Unless you’re seriously impaired or driving the car for the first time, it really shouldn’t be very difficult to control your speed without a speedometer.
You might get a ticket or two, but if the lack of a speedometer puts you in dangerous situations you shouldn’t be driving in the first place
Why not safe? There is absolutely nothing safety-critical on that display. I probably reboot the entertainment system while driving once a month or so. It’s no big deal.
The situation is just stupid - when I first posted my comment, I said the car would still be functional and that issue is not that serious, I immediately received a reply that basically criticizes me for being a pro-Tesla apologist (now deleted, apparently an honest misread), and now I have comments saying I'm anti-Tesla. But the fact is, I'm neither, I was simply expressing a specific criticism that it's not a good design that the dashboard is not separated from the rest of the entertainment system, and I said nothing about how good or bad Tesla is, as a car overall, or whether Tesla, Inc. is a good company.
> There are numerous problems with other cars and it doesn't receive any coverage
It's simply a result of much more attention and scrutiny of Tesla on HN because it's a popular car/company in the Silicon Valley.
I almost wish there had been another car with a digital cockpit that faced the same issue. Because I can imagine the glee that (some) Tesla owners would have.
Like they did when there was a Jeep remote vulnerability. "Haha. Way to do OTA totally wrong!".
...with absolutely no instrumentation? Sure, the wheel and pedals still work, but everything else is not controllable.
I've done some custom car stuff so I've had short drives without a dashboard, and while you could argue it's drivable, I wouldn't say safe.