Posted by arkadiyt 21 hours ago
I'd like to think failure to apply an OTA safety update would trigger a mail-out notification requesting you bring the vehicle into the dealer. But that's probably optimistic...
If the car has a recall or safety issue with the suspension part failing prematurely, what possibly could some software nonsense do?
Ford https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a70513450/ford-4-million-v...
GM https://www.themanual.com/auto/gm-brake-fluid-warning-recall...
I think Chrysler does it too, but I only find mention of the time they bricked a bunch of Wranglers with a bad OTA update.
Broadly I don't think it's hard to imagine a software update being safety critical if the software is used in a safety critical system.
To me it's a little bit like, "I love these new cellphones but I'm keeping it in airplane mode all the time because I don't want it online"
I mean what's the point of buying a new car if you're going to cripple features that are so much better because it's connected? Sure, use CarPlay or such, but to say forever end things like over the air software updates? Anything to prevent Kia from theoretically detecting sexual activity I suppose [1].
Just buy an old car. Or convert a classic into an EV [2].
There are A LOT of things in our lives that can be completely torn apart if one wants to. Glass is a vastly inferior window covering. Do you know how easy it breaks, and people can just look into it.
1 If you ask me, there's a whole whitepaper to be written about how to detect sexual activity in a Kia.
You can download and store Open Street Map for individual states. Map data doesn't have to come in over the air. That's not the problem. It's enhancing GPS with cell phone tower data that's the problem. That requires a cell connection.
What problem are we trying to solve here? At this point in time, guided navigation with completely offline maps and GPS has already been a no-brainer off-the-shelf thing for decades.
AFAIK it's almost always enhanced by things cell tower data, wifi network data, and external data sources (besides the satellites). Look up GPS/GNSS enhancement and augmentation for the latter.
Not GPS and WAAS. Not GPS and RTK. Not GPS + wifi + BT + cellular. I didn't mean any of those things, so I did not write any of those things.
If the thing is more than GPS -- by itself -- then that's outside the scope of what I was referring to with the juxtaposition of the words "GPS" and "itself".
(If a thing -- by itself -- can be better specified to be that way using concise phrasing, then I'm all ears.)
You could get more accurate fix with RTK data, but I'm not sure if that's actually widely used. And in any case that doesn't require active communications either, you could get correction data from satellite broadcasts too.
Technically it only requires an antenna that can listen on the LTE band (or even GSM). Trilaterating based on cell towers with a hackRF or other SDR is a fun exercise.
If your device has zero GPS signal then you can get ~100m accuracy from the cellular signals alone. If your device doesn't have "enhanced GPS" then you can get ~1m accuracy from the GPS signals alone.
Note that this changed with 5G beamforming. The new towers have a much better idea of where you are. (My understanding (thanks to other HN commenters) is that technically it's possible to do beamforming without deriving precise 3D coordinates but that this isn't how it's done in practice.)
I hate how this is a trade off. It’s totally possible for cars to broadcast their location only if the SOS is pressed or the crash sensor is triggered, but it feels like there’s no way to have that without also having everything else.
On the other hand, as mentioned by others: Why bother if you use CarPlay?