Automotive security and safety [LWN.net]

Automotive security and safety

Posted Feb 4, 2016 12:36 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Automotive security and safety by pizza
Parent article: Automotive security and safety

In Europe, I thought "infotainment" was banned, at least in the sense that an information screen was not allowed to show entertainment. afaik video is banned in the front seats (obviously not carcams, as that's "driver assist" technology).

oh - and I don't immediately go into reverse - I normally reverse-park on my drive, and most business car-parks I visit ban forward parking.

Cheers,
Wol

to post comments

Automotive security and safety

Posted Feb 4, 2016 21:55 UTC (Thu) by Pc5Y9sbv (guest, #41328) [Link] (13 responses)

There is a new US federal requirement for reverse cameras in all new vehicles to address what is seen as a rash of children being backed over by large SUVs, pickup trucks, etc. For this regulation to be effective, it does make sense that the reverse camera needs to begin functioning very soon after starting the vehicle. At least that seems logically consistent, even if one questions the original requirement.

And to Wol's comment, in many places in the US, "tail-in" parking is banned either by law or by property owners. Thus, reversing immediately after starting a vehicle is a much more common occurrence. I suggest we not debate here the possible causes for this difference in regulations, but instead recognize that there is a use case motivating certain real-time guarantees for vehicle information systems.

Automotive security and safety

Posted Feb 5, 2016 9:46 UTC (Fri) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link] (8 responses)

> to address what is seen as a rash of children being backed over by large SUVs, pickup trucks, etc.

The obvious solution to ban large SUVs (also on the grounds that they are horribly inefficient) didn't occur to them, obviously ;)

Automotive security and safety

Posted Feb 5, 2016 23:20 UTC (Fri) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (7 responses)

Even on a small sedan or mini-Cooper small children and pets are still invisible behind the rear bumper because they can be very short. And the camera has a 180° view from the back so that you can see cars coming from the sides when backing out from between two larger vehicles.

So you can see that a backup camera is very useful.

An aside:

I wish people would stop trying to ban things. If everyone got to ban everything else that annoyed them, no one would ever do anything. Or what would actually happen is no one at all would take laws seriously and everything anyone wanted to do would still get done but in the most corrupt manner possible. I can just see all the banned SUVs still driving around, as official "police vehicles", for a small donation to the local police chief or sheriff. And efficiency is already handled by market forces, because efficiency is cheaper.

Automotive security and safety

Posted Feb 6, 2016 6:18 UTC (Sat) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link] (1 responses)

> And efficiency is already handled by market forces, because efficiency is cheaper.

Ahh no, if that were the case there would only be a handful of car models around. And Porsche et al could immediately close down. Sorry, just not the case.

Automotive security and safety

Posted Feb 6, 2016 6:53 UTC (Sat) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link]

It IS the case. Efficiency is not the only driver there is. For a Porsche the buyer wants fun and is willing to pay for it. Why is this a problem? Must everyone always be focused on the good of all society, grim and joyless, toiling away in solidarity with his fellow man?

Nearly all entertainment is a waste of energy and resources. So we should come home from our 12 hour work shifts, eat our tasteless beans and lentils under the light of a single 10W LED, huddled around our one tiny gas heater for warmth, for the sake of efficiency. . .

No, there has to be room for fun, convenience.

Notice that car makers could barely GIVE electric vehicles away until Tesla made them fun. All of the ones I noticed before that were efficiency driven golf carts and less fun to drive than a 4 cylinder Geo Metro.

Automotive security and safety

Posted Feb 8, 2016 12:11 UTC (Mon) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link] (4 responses)

> And efficiency is already handled by market forces, because efficiency is cheaper.

It depends. If the source material (e.g. fuel) is cheap enough, it will be more expensive to modify your processes/products to use less of it than you/users would gain from the price difference. That's why we needed the oil crisis to turn our attention to fuel efficiency. (And then the prices went back down and the lesson was mostly forgotten.)

Also it's more "efficient" (cheaper) to dump your toxic waste into the nearby river (or air, in case of cars), so companies (or their products) always did that instead of treating the waste. How do market forces fix *that*?

Automotive security and safety

Posted Feb 8, 2016 15:31 UTC (Mon) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (3 responses)

> > And efficiency is already handled by market forces, because efficiency is cheaper.
> It depends. If the source material (e.g. fuel) is cheap enough, it will be more expensive to modify your processes/products to use less of it than you/users would gain from the price difference.

In that case efficiency is best served by preserving your current processes/products. A narrow focus on fuel efficiency would be a false economy, resulting in more waste overall. Economic calculation is concerned with the optimal use of *all* our resources, including but not limited to natural resources.

> Also it's more "efficient" (cheaper) to dump your toxic waste into the nearby river (or air, in case of cars), so companies (or their products) always did that instead of treating the waste. How do market forces fix *that*?

If dumping waste into the rivers/air causes harm to others and/or their property, that is a tort. Market forces include paying compensation when your actions infringe on others' property rights. If your actions show a deliberate or reckless disregard for others' property rights you also open yourself up to entirely justifiable reciprocal damage to your own property (typically formalized through fines).

Automotive security and safety

Posted Feb 8, 2016 16:30 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (2 responses)

This is getting pretty far off-topic, maybe this kind of discussion should be better had elsewhere?

> If dumping waste into the rivers/air causes harm to others and/or their property, that is a tort. Market forces include paying compensation ...

We can test the effectiveness of this approach because we have actual experience with it, in many countries and many time periods, which shows that like command economies, it doesn't work in practice. This approach to environmentalism puts most of the cost on the victims, and its not as if given a choice the polluters will choose to most strongly affect the wealthy who could cause the most trouble for them, they pollute in out of the way places with little economic activity so the people they most strongly affect don't have the resources to put up a spirited defense, they may even be beholden to the polluter for the most basic necessities of life.

We can also see that when damages via tort are awarded they are much much lower than the full cost of the actual damage done, or the profits gained from doing the damage in the first place, because the courts are loath to bankrupt companies due to all the other effect this causes (layoffs, inability to pay due to lack of income, etc.). In addition, money can't buy everything, you can't un-ring a bell no matter how much money you throw at it, you can't re-grow and old-growth-forest overnight or replace an extinct species or whatever, even trying to repair environmental damage often costs far far far more than the industry doing the polluting can bear, they often write environmental checks that bounce.

I understand the symmetry and simplicity of a theory that you could find balance using property ownership and money, like you balance a budget, that you could find some natural equilibrium if you just let things play out but in the real world thats not how it works, without a pretty strong opposing force the polluting party will use their money and influence to make sure that the system is never in equilibrium but tilted in every possible way to their favor, so an appeal to "market forces" in practice is an appeal for the strong to crush the weak and to take away any tool that the weak can use to band together to challenge the power of the strong.

Automotive security and safety

Posted Feb 8, 2016 19:32 UTC (Mon) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (1 responses)

> We can also see that when damages via tort are awarded they are much much lower than the full cost of the actual damage done, or the profits gained from doing the damage in the first place, because the courts are loath to bankrupt companies...

So either make the courts do their jobs properly, and/or get out of the way and let the victims organize their own (proportional) response which actually will compensate them for the full damage done. What you are complaining about, in essence, is that the government is protecting the polluters, refusing to hold them accountable when there is demonstrable harm from their actions; and your solution is that the same government should turn around and punish both polluters and innocent third-parties with over-broad regulations not justified by any actual evidence of harm. Just fix the original problem; don't add to it!

Automotive security and safety

Posted Feb 8, 2016 21:28 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> let the victims organize their own (proportional) response which actually will compensate them for the full damage done

In a democratic society, the government _is_ a group of people self-organizing to compensate and hold accountable the individual members and groups that those members create, like corporations, for the harm they do to other members, so saying both that government should "get out of the way" and that people should organize to hold polluters accountable and responsible for the problems they cause are fundamentally contradictory statements. "The Government" wasn't created by aliens from Mars and imposed upon us, it is what we created, or failed to create due to lack of attention, and it works as well or as poorly as we allow it to, but any structure which provides the services you describe is a government.

Automotive security and safety

Posted Feb 11, 2016 12:13 UTC (Thu) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link] (3 responses)

Thanks to you and pizza for the perspective on why the immediate back-view would be useful. I’m not clear why a lane overview is strictly necessary to prevent most accidents, though.

My naive engineering solutions would be to boot the IVI system once the car is unlocked – if you are going from opening the door to turning wheels in less than five seconds you are probably missing a lot in the diligence department…

Automotive security and safety

Posted Feb 12, 2016 13:16 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

>My naive engineering solutions would be to boot the IVI system once the car is unlocked – if you are going from opening the door to turning wheels in less than five seconds you are probably missing a lot in the diligence department…

Or even more naive -- boot the IVI system as soon as the battery is hooked up, and leave it in a low-power/suspended state when the ignition is off. Either way that would mean disabling the fancy animated boot splash/logo that seems to be the norm on modern IVI systems.

As far as lane overviews are concerned, it's more to do with denoting the car's actual width, especially as those reverse cameras are so wide-angle that they tend to distort perspective.

Automotive security and safety

Posted Feb 23, 2016 15:47 UTC (Tue) by steffen780 (guest, #68142) [Link] (1 responses)

Or how about making the restriction sensible? For safety it is entirely irrelevant how long after boot the camera comes on. For safety it matters that the camera is on BEFORE the car accelerates beyond a speed of 0. So simply don't activate the gas pedal until the camera has been on for, say, 3 seconds. That way any delays are an issue of an irrelevant delay of a few seconds and not dead kids under your car...

Automotive security and safety

Posted Feb 23, 2016 19:52 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

A brilliant idea, sure. A camera craps out (a loose cable or something) and the car is undriveable.