Hackers Fool Tesla S's Autopilot to Hide and Spoof Obstacles

I'm all for stringently hammering these technologies to make sure that they're bulletproof, but what they are proposing with their hacks is equivalent to putting up a fake car on the road to make a real driver swerve or blinding a real driver with lasers.

I thought the article was going to talk about hacking into the electronics remotely.

In all fairness to Tesla, I think that there is a limit to what they can do to prevent malicious physical damage to a car's sensors by a determined road-side attacker.

>In all fairness to Tesla, I think that there is a limit to what they can do to prevent malicious physical damage to a car's sensors by a determined road-side attacker.

It's not physical damage or blinding a real driver with lasers... it's signal jamming of the sensor package.

The 'Wired' article is a little misleading. The costs of the radar jamming hack are greatly exaggerated. The project, as described, is a research project not a production project. The $90,000 arbitrary signal generator is not necessary and could easily be substituted for the $40 low end components used for the ultrasonic tests. Researchers will typically use an expensive arbitrary generator because it's research and many different kinds of signals are required to test things out. However, once the signal waveforms have been designed and captured, very cheap baseband components can be used to create a production unit.

In any case, if an autonomous vehicle doesn't respond to jamming by shutting down the autonomous driving mode... that's a really big problem.

"You can trust our autopilot," they said.

"It's perfectly safe," they said.

Actually, as I recall Tesla said you need to keep both hands on the wheel and pay attention even when using autopilot. Of course, that makes it totally pointless as far as I can tell, but I think that was their official safety advice.

> Actually, as I recall Tesla said you need to keep both hands on the wheel and pay attention even when using autopilot. Of course, that makes it totally pointless as far as I can tell, but I think that was their official safety advice.

Which pretty much makes it a very expensive, yet useless feature - as you said. But I'm sure the sales people can make it sound wonderful and safe still.