Comment on Doordash deserves it's fate
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 week agoWho said anything about software? Cut the wires to the battery! That will power down any car no matter what.
The benefit to stealing a self driving car is that it’s a self driving car! What’s the retail price of self driving cars? $100k? More? The whole premise of the self-driving taxi and delivery companies is that the cars are too expensive for the consumer market so they operate on a rental basis instead. If self-driving cars became a mass market commodity like regular cars then thieves would just steal them the old fashioned way.
Of course the self-driving features work without the network. GPS works without a cell network. It’s a receive-only protocol. The only thing that won’t work is the remote command and control dispatch. That would have to be hacked around.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Cutting the wires will work, but it’s already recorded it’s location and transmitted that data by the point you get to that point.
There’s no way that the self-driving car companies won’t require regular check ins on the network to function in self-driving mode. You can’t even play many single player video games these days without an internet connection.
Essentially it won’t be a self-driving car once you’ve stolen it, and it may not even be a regular car either because some of the proposed models don’t even have steering wheels or pedals. Even if you did crack the software, it’s not going to be loaded with any sort of relevant self-driving functionality for <insert 3rd world country where they don’t check vehicle registration here>, it won’t have maps, it won’t be trained on the local signs, traffic lights, road markings, etc. it may not even operate on the correct side of the road.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 week ago
It’s transmitted that data but the gang has blocked the server from receiving it. I mentioned that earlier. This whole operation doesn’t go down unless you take out the eyes and ears of the company.
All that other stuff can be replaced. It’s still a car with a $15,000 battery in it and drivetrain and all the sensors and electronics.
And if the hackers can break in and steal data, they can steal the source code. Then they have all the keys to the kingdom.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Then the gang is going to have to take out both the self-driving car company AND the cellphone company at the same time. It’s not just one getting the data, and again it’s going to get noticed immediately if cars start going missing and data is being blocked. They may get ahold of a few dozen cars if they try to do it quickly, but they won’t get even hundreds.
The battery may worth something, but it’s a lot of effort to steal a car just to get a $15k battery. Criminal gangs aren’t stealing 5 year old Kia Niros for resale across the globe, they generally target vehicles worth 3-10x that much.
There’s no “source code” for self driving cars in the sense that a video game has source code. The cars have some normal code yes, but the self-driving portion is a trained machine learning model that is essentially a black box. It takes millions of compute hours on high end graphics cards along with millions of hours of driving data to generate a new version of that model. Stealing the existing driving model still won’t make it work in West Africa or the Middle East. Stealing the training data wouldn’t help get it driving there either, they’d have to collect millions of hours of local training data for each destination.
It would be easier for these gangs to start their own self-driving company.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I mean who knows. Maybe they just steal whatever valuable parts they can carry and dump the rest.
The model has to be stored in the car for it to work. I mean can you imagine the car driving along and a network interruption causes the self-driving system to be unresponsive for a second? That could cause a crash immediately!
So then if the model is stored in the car itself it can be stolen and sold to a rival self-driving car company in Russia or what have you. And in that case they could definitely repurpose the entire stolen car itself. They just need to replace the client code with their own so that the car connects to their servers.
Besides, the model isn’t going to have maps or server connection stuff built into it. The maps are external and part of the GPS navigation, so those can be replaced. And all the command and control stuff is just conventionally programmed client software that can be redirected to another server or even a server hosted locally within the car itself for autonomous driving.