For example, 2021 Model 3 SR+ vehicles can enable the Cold Weather Feature (heated steering wheel, heated rear seats) for an extra $300. This feature unlock is confirmed to work with the exploit.
So like cucks people were paying for something that their car already had offline, both hardware- and software-wise.
No kink shaking please. They like to watch when daddy X smashes their bank accounts, there’s nothing wrong with that.
There is a kink where guys get off on sending women money, often without having any contact with her. It’s called FinDom.
I’m open to becoming a FinDom daddy. Send me your money cucks!
Pretty sure you would be a fin sub in that case
Can I cuss them if they send too little? Does that turn them on? I guess I could finally get into sex work.
I’ve thought for a while that Tesla relies a lot on people who a) have money to throw at a car that’s too expensive, b) have money to throw at features that should be free, and c) do a and b because they think Tesla and Musk are cool.
Tesla actually market it as a positive.
Car manufacturers have to setup different manufacturing lines to provide different feature levels. Tesla argue this makes them more expensive. Tesla cars have all features installed, just disabled and the optional extra packages are cheaper compared to their rivals as a result.
To be honest there is a certain logic, if you’ve ever been in a Ford Focus LX (bottom range) its pretty clear they had to spend quite a bit of money on more basic systems. I honestly thought each LX was sold at a loss
Then make heated seats part of the base model. In the 1950s a heater was an optional accessory, but became standard sometime in the 1960s. (I don’t know exact years, if someone fact checks me I’m probably wrong, but close enough for discussion) radio went from not an option to am was an option, to FM mono, FM stereo, cassettes, CD, mp3. At one point you could get a record player as well (I think only about 200 were sold in total). AC used to be an option, became standard in the 1990s.
We will keep running this game as manufactures decide to make more and more things standard to make assembly easier.
You can get any color you want as long as it’s black.
But also fuck Tesla if I own the computer and the seats so I can do whatever I want with them
While I’m not a fan of many of these things, it locked behind a one time fee is better than these subscription models many are coming out with.
I hate that you are right. How did we manage to fuck up heated seats. It’s literally just supposed to keep our asses warm. This ain’t some complex software intensive thing like navigation
Pay 19.95 per month for your brakes to work!
For no extra charge, you get standard braking ability.
For emergency braking, you can either pay $19.95/month OR $49.99 per occurrence!
That’s just paying a little more for your car when you buy it, not as a dlc.
Unless you couldn’t afford the fancy features and later could, or move somewhere colder from somewhere warm, but all the pieces are already there and built.
It’s a very old practice. IBM mainframes back in the 1970s/80s would come in various configurations. ‘Upgrading’ the machine to the improved performance spec was achieved by cutting an internal wire
Then just include it. My Acura had one option, with or without navigation.
Well, for what it’s worth, I don’t think the base cars pay for heated seats. It was more of an early Model 3 thing. I could go into the economics of why, but I doubt that would be a productive conversation
Not defending this practise but this is nothing new and has been happening for decades on other cars. It’s typically cheaper to manufacture everything on mass, including the higher features, and just not wire it up in lower end cars. Very common for things like heated car seats, I remember one of my old Mitsubishi had everything in the seat but just didn’t have the heated seat control button and fuse.
Locked by software is a whole new level though.
but that wouldnt stop you from buying the switch and putting it in your own. and mitsubishi wasnt removing your service apointments or cancling your subscriptions when you complained… or modified your car… and i will bet you could order the parts missing direct from mitz as well as having them install them or…gasp a third party garage.
Constant drm checks are what’s different. I in the old days, the company cannot track you as efficiently as today, so you have more freedom to modify you car. Today there is a somewhat live update of what you are doing with your car, and the company has the power and means to punish you accordingly.
It’s probably cheaper to build cars that way than to have dozens of different configurations. The small loss they take on the hardware by giving away the hardware but locking it is offset by the increased production efficiency.
Well it’s probably even cheaper to not invest in locking systems.
Nah, they only need to split production lines when things are radically different. Excluding parts is usually easy, because the production line simply doesn’t install the missing part. The car still moves through the same line at the same rate regardless, so it saves them parts to not install.
The real reason they include them is so they can have their salespeople upsell you at the store. You weren’t originally planning on getting heated seats, but it’s only a few hundred more to do it and you’re already applying for the loan. A few hundred won’t make a huge difference. Also, we have this other feature that’s also only a few hundred more, and this other feature, and… Before you know it, they’ve upsold you into paying $5k more than you intended, simply by activating things that the car already had installed.
This has apparently being a thing for a long while. I read that in the past some models of BMW came with heated seats but the switch (and maybe a relay I’m guessing) why for unless the premium was paid. It was an early diy upgrade
Cucks love it
If all electric cars are just going to be subscription bullshit, I’m sorry, I won’t be driving electric.
Even ICE manufacturers have been including hardware that software disabled for a while
I got an OBDeleven for my 2015 GTI so I could unlock stuff and customize. Enabled rolling down the windows with the key fob, being able to display the engine oil temp in the dash and also setting the accelerator pedal curve to linear.
What I didn’t even know that was stuff you could even do
The accelerator curve is really cool. A lot of modern cars just have a sensor that detects your pedal position and a simple algorithm decides how much power to translate that into. It’s like adjusting the mouse speed on a computer. Feels like you’re driving a different car.
Having said that, the default curve is often the best curve. They put a lot more effort into getting it right than you would.
Kinda depends on the car. Volkswagen cars are pretty “hackable” with OBDeleven which is a wireless interface for the hilariously named “VAGCOM” protocol.
OBDeleven
Hang on, have I being saying this wrong for years? I thought it was OBDII or OBD2 ?
It is OBD2, OBDeleven is a Bluetooth dongle you plug into it
Subscribe to enable your BMW seat heater! They definitely require periodic software updates and is absolutely NOT a blatant money grab
Audi had been doing this for years and they even disable stuff Iif you sell your car to another private person. One of my friends bought a used Audi and everything was disabled so he installed a cracked version of the infotainment software and now the only thing that doesn’t work is the fingerprint unlock.
A fingerprint unlock on a car? I’ve never heard of that, is it to unlock the doors?
I recently read about 2 or 3 cars doing the whole user your fingerprint to unlock doors and start the car thing. This is one of the reviews I read
https://www.thedrive.com/new-cars/41690/how-the-2022-genesis-gv70-removes-all-need-for-a-car-key
It uses your fingerprint to start.
Probably used for user profiles for the seats and stuff and Aircon. Mercedes does it too
Don’t know: there is a fingerprint reader on the handle of the car but it doesn’t work
There are some manufacturers that do not do this garbage, or at least not often. I’ve heard good things about Hyundai specifically.
For now they have customer goodwill to win back after nearly a decade of building cars that practically fell apart in a year or 2 in the late 00s and early 10s.
They’ll catch up to the others in anti-consumer practices soon, but for now they’re a good choice if you don’t particularly care for performance or ride quality.
Tesla got rid of the heater subscription bullshit in 2021. Now, the only thing locked behind a paywall is internet related stuff (sentry over mobile, streaming media access, etc.), the performance boost, and FSD.
only lol
But if the car is completely capable of habe that performance, why should people pay for it.
Oh I’m just correcting the article. Facts are better than fiction for conversations about reality.
It won’t just be electric cars, it’ll be all new model cars from manufacturing companies. At least until ICE is phased out.
More like, until the Chinese weasel their way into the US market with cheaper-than-used cars to undercut the legacy auto makers. 10 years or so, it’ll happen. And the big 3 will be begging for bailouts again. That is unless they smarten up and remember what made Ford what it is today.
remember what made Ford what it is today.
American can-do spirit, worker’s rights, and throbbing fuckloads of antisemitism.
FORD
For
Old
Racist
Dudes
I don’t see that happening. The US puts large tariffs on imported cars to stifle competition. That’s why if you look at Japanese cars in Japan or German cars in Germany they’re often much cheaper and more powerful than their American counterparts.
German cars in Germany
German cars in Europe also seems to last pretty decently where as American-made German cars apparently keep falling apart after 5 years lol
You know what Ford stands for, don’t ya? It stands for ‘Fix it again, Tony’ hehehe.
They’re already doing that in some parts of the world. Then when they get sizeable market share, they emulated what the previous car makers do. It’s just not an improvement. It’s more of the same, only the manufacturer is different.
Cory Doctorow has written a great article about this phenomenon a few days ago: https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon
Basically we move back to a feudalism world where you don’t own anything anymore and you have to pay recurring rents. And as you don’t own it they can fuck you over by increasing rents or disable features when you can’t pay.
Have you seen the automotive industry as of late? This isn’t a EV issue nor is it really new. We’ve had things like OnStar for years and the entire industry has started to chase the gaming industry’s microtransaction BS for a while now.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/23204950/bmw-subscriptions-microtransactions-heated-seats-feature
https://www.thedrive.com/news/43329/toyota-made-its-key-fob-remote-start-into-a-subscription-service
The future looks like a potential live service hell scape for the auto industry EV or otherwise.
Everything is being ruined. It feels like hyperbole but I’m not sure it is.
Yes, I know it’s industry wide. What I’m saying is that with EV being the future of cars I don’t want them all to be subscription based.
I have a Rivian and it works great with no subscription. The only thing you can add via Sub is a hotspot, which seems reasonable to me.
I’m okay with being charged a monthly subscription for something that has an ongoing cost, like mobile data. So long as I can still hotspot my phone and access ‘premium connectivity’ features over wifi, that is.
Yeah about those ‘premium connectivity features’… one of them is warning you that the road you’re about to drive on has a traffic jam. And no, you can’t have it use your phone’s internet connection and you also can’t do CarPlay or Android Auto.
For me real time traffic isn’t a premium feature or an ad on. It’s table stakes. And it should be free. Worse, not having it already almost makes your car hard to sell secondhand. Imagine what it’ll be like several years ago when people start selling Rivians?
I agree, I do think they should allow both aa/cp, and wifi while driving so you can tether to your phones wifi. I’m not as doom about secondhand sales as you seem to be though.
At some point, there will be practically nothing else to drive…
All the more reason to support public transportation.
The average lemming:
- concerned about online privacy
- strongly against digital surveillance
- rides exclusively public transit where there is surveillance everywhere
There is surveillance everywhere outside, even having your own car doesn’t protect you from having your privacy encroached. That’s why I never go outside.
There’s cameras everywhere watching the road too if you really care that much and you better believe your car model and license plate is a much more reliable form of identifying information than a blurry face on a bus security camera.
There are fundamental differences between physical and digital surveillance, namely when you are in a public space there is no expectation of privacy because there are other people there looking at you. When there are other people there that can actually see you, a camera also watching doesn’t make much of a difference.
it does
people usually doesn’t remember you unless you do some weird shit but once recorded, it will stay for the rest of eternity
If you’re talking about standard security cameras usually the footage will get completely overwritten after afeew days unless there was an incident to prompt review of the footage-- and even then it usually gets deleted at some point. Its not like with social media data gathering where they’re collecting all that information in order to build a personal profile of everyone-- security cameras just exist to review incidents that happen in the public realm and there’s no real incentive for a public transit agency to track every single person that appears on their cameras.
I hope you don’t go outside at all, with that mentality.
They aren’t, but if you want certain features or named brands don’t be surprised.
Common AMD W
Cool! Now work on exploits for those paywalled features of BMW cars and Ford cars.
If you pay for something it’s yours by right. You should be able to use the entire thing, because you physically have it now.
When I need a new car it’s going to br older not newer…
What’s pay walled in a Ford besides bluecruise, which is a service that’s constantly updated to add more roads and expand it’s usability?
A jailbreak for your car, two decades ago this would have been absurd.
Now, if they really want to go for it, how about the ability to have universally swappable EV batteries for electric cars. It’s funny how they are trying to bring them back to smartphones and ignoring the huge improvement it would be for EVs. All electric cars would have to do is have supports and internal ports to connect the swappable batteries in their trunks, no need to touch the internal EV battery.
Even if it was some shit mileage, like 10-20km, it would seriously revolutionize the roads. Forget trying to find a spot to charge at, it would provide enough business opportunities to just be able to call and have a swappable battery delivered to you and replaced, fast food style. Presumably with batteries that don’t easily catch on fire when mishandled and have additional safety mechanisms, like the rather common and rather high capacity LiFePO4 batteries.
I saw a documentary about Renault doing this in Israel I think. With a network of stations looking like auto wash: it takes your car, opens a door under the car, swaps the battery with a full one and off you go.
Apparently it went bankrupt after a year (2012-2013): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company)
Tesla had this exact functionality with their original Model S’ … but like that company it wasn’t profitable (or it was just regular ol Tesla mismanagement) so they also stopped doing it.
I know a guy who started a company to do exactly this (in Europe only for now).
So the battery swap idea is out there, and being acted upon.
The only problem I have with the current ideas for battery swaps is that they are still very proprietary so would only affect a small set of vehicles. The most universal alternatives I’ve seen have to be hauled as trailers.
I think that rather than one singular battery swap idea, it should be a standard where anyone can make one, just as long as it fits in the trunk and can be secured and connected into a standardized high voltage port in the trunk that wouldn’t have to be that different from the current ones being used. The problem then would be trying to force companies to retrofit older models. Maybe there will be more of an incentive to have something like this when EV batteries begin dying out after 20+ years with cars that are otherwise perfectly fine to drive.
They can recycle 99% of the battery. You can crush it, separate and reuse. It’s actually pretty cool. Don’t know why you’d want to swap batteries that last for over 300,000 miles and soon to probably last longer than the car itself.
Unpatchable
Good to hear
Good. There should be no such thing as unserviced features that are physically present in a product and locked out against its owner. Not in cars or anything.
Why not?
Because it’s abusive and blatant rent seeking.
Look, if there’s an actual service feature that continually costs money to provide (eg.: a cell connection for distant remote start, GPS nav map updates, etc), charging a reasonable subscription fee for that is totally acceptable. But charging ongoing fees for fixed features like heated seats is 100% bullshit unless you’re going to include some sort of service benefits like free repairs (which I doubt they’re doing).
Next we will see tesla bricking cars were users have done this
More E-waste!
Unlikely, but expect to see more language in sales contracts that “if absolutely any of the software is fucked with in absolutely any way that wasnt done by us the vehicles warranty is absolutely null and void. We also reserve the right to refuse to provide any and all parts and services to any vehicle found to have had its software modified outside of factory parameters.” And you best believe they will keep a list of vins and wont care if it was the previous owner.
Even if it is in the contract, it’s not enforceable (depending on country). In a fair few, the manufacturer has to prove that the modifications caused the defect to invalidate the warranty.
It’s unclear what would happen if they simply refused to service the car, or bricked it instead.
Bricking it would be a legal minefield for them, they wouldnt dare. But making literally anything to do with servicing, updates and repairs such a colossal ball ache that its easier and cheaper to just pay for the heated seats…
I did speak a little broadly, they couldnt deny you the warranty on the wheel bearings or purely mechanical parts but they dont need to prove that the jailbreaking is the cause of literally anything electrical going to shit, they just need to say “That item is controlled by software that has been modified outside of manufacturers specifications, we are refusing to honor the warranty on this item”
Same with servicing “As this vehicle has been modified outside of our recommended parameters we cannot guarantee our repairs and as such we recommend the customer seek an alternative mechanical workshop for servicing and repairs”
Oh sure, you could fight it and win, you might join a class action and get $8 in 3 years time. Or… just dont jailbreak their product and make your life hell. I absolutely disagree with this subscription and paywall bullshit, but I do not underestimate the tomfuckery that big companies will pull to fuck customers.
A subscription for hardware is such bullshit, I hope this trend dies.
We can all do our part by not buying anything from those who do this.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Utilizing multiple connections to the power supply, BIOS SPI chip, and SVI2 bus, the researchers performed a voltage fault injection attack on the MCU-Z’s Platform Security Processor.
“They allow an attacker to decrypt the encrypted NVMe storage and access private user data such as the phonebook, calendar entries, etc.”
“Hacking the embedded car computer could allow users to unlock these features without paying,” the TU Berlin researchers add.
In an email to Tom’s Hardware, one of the researchers clarified that not all Tesla software upgrades are accessible, so it remains to be seen if those premium options will also be ripe for picking.
Another consequence is that the exploit can “extract an otherwise vehicle-unique hardware-bound RSA key used to authenticate and authorize a car in Tesla’s internal service network.”
The TU Berlin team (consisting of PhD students Christian Werling, Niclas Kühnapfel, and Hans Niklas Jacob, along with security researcher Oleg Drokin) will present their findings next week (August 9) at the Blackhat conference in Las Vegas, where we hope to hear more about all the feature upgrades that are accessible.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good Bot
Id like to imagine that the coder did this on person as a fuck u.
The coder’s name was Galen Erso
Nice anti-AMD framing so shortly after that latest Zen2 vulnerability.
Right? Probably for attention grabbing, cause they do say the same flaw exists in zen2 and zen3, and the article is by no means slamming AMD for it. But the title does come off that way
It’s probably because there are both Intel and amd Tesla cars. Newer models use AMD
Idk unpatcheable vulnerability for the core component of the system seems pretty negligent but what do I know
Not like they make boat loads of profit and are definitely just cutting corners on aspects of staffing to save extra money up for when the planet inevitably burns down (due to the very same people)
The vulnerability is much more of an issue for Tesla('s profits) than the owners. It’s not a simple exploit and not the worst concern for average users of those chips. You have to have physical access to it in order to exploit it, as well as a system worth hacking (think, national security trying to prevent compromised personnel from physically using the exploit on their systems). I’m not worried about someone breaking into my house to physically hack my computer, just to find some memes and bullshit
It still has to be addressed by both Intel and AMD, because that’s their whole industry. But recalls and such aren’t needed, because bugs can be exploited all over the place and this one isn’t a high level risk for the average end-user. It’s more of a concern for Intel/AMD reputation and the large industry users of their chips
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=PWQL_XORalY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Good bot
Oh no! Anyways…
The title seems much more interesting than it is. I doubt most people have the ability to perform this type of exploit. It would be more interesting if a group would charge X to unlock it for you.
