Toyota, Intel, Ericsson team to get cars talking to the cloud Toyota, Intel, Ericsson, with friends, have formed a new “Automotive Edge Computing Consortium” to “develop an ecosystem for connected cars to support emerging services such as intelligent driving, the creation of maps with real-time data and driving assistance based on cloud computing.” Nippon Telegraph and Telephone …
...to support emerging services such as intelligent driving, the creation of maps with real-time data and driving assistance based on cloud computing.
...advertising, costing obscene amounts of money to repair, planned obsolescence, government tracking, getting hacked, leaking information useful to robbers, murdering pedestrians with glee by remote control...
From a technical point of view it makes a lot of sense; a common framework will allow all sorts of beneficial features, like instantly sharing the emergence of a new pothole with all other road users, (including the robot built to go fill them). My car can tell your car that my front left tyre just burst and I'm about to veer into your path, all within a few nanoseconds of the type bursting. It could also be used to more safely organise car drafting each other for better fuel efficiency.
I wonder if Ericsson will be pushing Erlang.
Some of that sounds nice. However, that the entire infrastructure is woefully unreliable once you consider people's lives actually depend on these systems. You simply can't accept most types of communication glitches that happen regularly. The cost to make it fit for purpose, I suspect, is far too high for it to enter the mainstream.
If you drive around any large city you will see a large number of wetware communication glitches happening every day. Some of these cause accidents. One assumes that if an autonomous vehicle loses network connection it will revert to local autonomous mode and be very cautious. Rather than, e.g. as in human driver case, scream "there's a wasp in the car" and swerve around the road.
It makes no sense to have cars connected to a global network for warning of local problems. Given the security history of car makers, it would be perfectly acceptable to have cars send a warning by radio signal, with other cars arriving on-site getting the warning and displaying the corresponding signal.
It's a local problem. People on the Internet in Singapore have no use knowing that I have a flat tire in the plains of France.
And we are not yet at a point where we need nanosecond reaction times when driving.
This is not pod racing.
Hack the cloud and send the 'stop now' or worse, 'disable' command to all connected cars.
Imagine the chaos and even loss of life.
"But Officer, the car just stopped on its own accord".
Don't these people ever think of the downsides?
Nah, that's too difficult.
Then you get all those 'over the air' updates to your car's system. Tesla already do this. Another attach vector.
"Hack the cloud and send the 'stop now' or worse, 'disable' command to all connected cars.
"
This is just an example of why the security services must not be allowed any input. Nobody sane would include any such functionality without a "when safe to do so" override.
Hundreds of people, if not thousands, are working on these systems. I've been involved in technical safety committees and the amount of thought that goes into "what could go wrong" is enormous (we're not talking sociopathic Silicon Valley "disruption" here, but sober things like the IEEE and the IEC.). Yet random Internet poster assumes that because they can think of an undesirable failure case, none of those people who have spent years thinking about it in conjunction with others would have spotted it.
It is just possible, but very unlikely. As I say, the biggest risk is political or TLA interference, because they are the ones who do not think outside their very narrow boxes or understand the subject.
The hundreds, if not thousands of people you are referring to all have a vested interest in this working. It is not in their interests to point out the stupidity inherent in many of the ideas mentioned. If you want public transport, that is absolutely fine, and the aviation industry is a good model to follow with highly connected and closely tracked vehicles (though you still get the odd MH370) but how does that add anything other then excessive costs to private travel.
I was thinking of it in a different direction.
"But officer, I wasn't speeding and I did not run that stop sign!" "Well, let me just check the telemetry data that was sent to the cloud ... Yes, I see. According to this data, you did not drive slower than 4 MPH in the last 10 minutes and your maximum speed during that time was 66 MPH, but this is a 55 zone. And stop signs require a full stop, not a 4 MPH rolling stop."
Not that I am defending speeding or running stop lights/signs. But can you honestly say you do not speed? Would you like that information stored safely in the cloud available to the police even if they have a warrant? Everybody makes mistakes, would you like your mistakes preserved so that they can be later used against you?
"But officer, I didn't rob that bank. In fact, I wasn't anywhere near the bank while it was being robbed!" "Well, according to your vehicle's telemetry, your car was parked in the bank's parking lot at the exact same time as it was being robbed. Now how do you explain how your vehicle was at the bank while it was being robbed while not having a verifiable alibi?"
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