"My idea"?! I am not espousing an idea, simply stating actual fact. Software is not secure, never has been, never will be, and its use should be considered with the logical concept that "this will be hacked".

Thus if your car needs to communicate with anything for "system updates", it's been designed wrong. People had cars for decades, with digital control systems and zero networking capability. It's literally not required, at all, to develop, maintain, or have a car that operates perfectly.

One of the main problems is that cars literally have too much software onboard. There is no need for an app store for a car. No need for networking. No need for update-to-date info. None. You have a smartphone, and that can connect to an entirely isolated screen in the car, if you want maps displayed for your own edification. Anything networked, eg bluetooth, etc, should be entirely isolated from the rest of the car.

In terms of self-driving, updates can be applied manually. USB sticks aren't that uncommon. Dealers are available. The amount of times new city streets are created is extremely rare, and you can always close-destination and direct manually beyond that point. Cars can then remember a location, and draw in a street as if finds it, thus enabling easy return.

The truth is it doesn't matter how "convenient" something may be, you don't just brush security and safety aside to do it. You don't make people's lives easier, at the expense of safety, security, and so on. You just don't.

And that's what every networked car represents. Brushing aside safety for convenience.

I've been waiting for hackers to remote-hack the battery charging module in cars for quite some time. Depending on the unit's configuration, some car models could be hacked to all explode and burst into flames due to overcharging, at specific times.

How would society respond, in 1 in 10 houses caught fire at 2am on the same night?

* There'd be fires everywhere, and those fires would spread, as there are not enough fire departments to deal with even 1 in 100 houses catching fire in a night

* Massive amounts of infra would be compromised

* Massive amounts of transportation capability would be gone

Society would be devastated. It'd be worse than an air bombing campaign.

Yet I'm willing to bet there is a path from most car's networking -> charge controller, along with it being remote flashable with a new firmware too.

Madness. Stupidity. Insanity.

Other discussions are about how people coordinate cars in a group. This is ripe for trouble, even with just people messing about. People would game this system to push other cars out of the way, using it to gain pseudo priority. Teenagers and malign actors would cause all cars in a swarm to emergency brake, but sending emergency brake intentions. Cars would be manipulated into running into each other, or into guardrails, after being sent "emergency swerve" info from cars in front, or "I'm beside you but I'm emergency swerving into your lane!" messages.

If anyone looks at the current state of almost all lane-keep tech, it's a joke and dangerous. Forums are repleted with "turn off this functionality" panic messages, as people are having to constantly fight their cars to keep them from doing very dumb things.

Real self-driving is at least 20 to 30 years away. Even those at the forefront (like Waymo) are not self-driving. Instead, they've super-mapped the areas that Waymo operates in, warm climates with low amounts of rain, no snow, city areas with unchanging landscapes and an immense amount of cues and markers.

Take a Waymo to an unmapped location and it's useless. That's not self-driving.

Take a Waymo to a Northern US rural area in the winter, where there are no road lines to be seen due to slush and snow on the road. It will fail completely and utterly. That's not self driving. Any local driver handles that daily without issue.

Waymo still has a phalanx of people monitoring all aspects of how its cars are performing, ready to step in at a moment's notice. They get edge-case stuck in dumb places, do weird things (like waking up entire blocks of people due to honking senselessly all night long), they are not self-driving capable.

Instead, they are "we mapped all these streets a billion times over, and with human intervention and the absolutely perfect weather in SF and the US South, can get a car to kinds sorta almost self-drive", but "It'll never work in the rest of the world".

By the time true self-driving is a real thing, it'll be hand in hand with AI that is capable of handling "I don't have that address" and "Show me the closest address" and "where do I go from here", where you say "Go down two streets and then turn left" works.

We do not need networking in our cars. The internet is a poison.

One side note.

This is an excellent business opportunity for someone such as SpaceX. They could create entirely isolated vlan, non-internet traffic for car manufacturers far more isolated than anyone. Such traffic could be isolated and never have direct connection to the internet, which would reduce the attack surface dramatically.

It would still be dangerous. Just less so than the absolutely absurd and ridiculous scenario where we have cars connect to the most hostile environment known, the internet.

To end this blathering and spewing, I'll say this. Would you want brain surgery done by a robot that is receiving instructions over the internet? Then why do you want tonnes of vehicles flying down the road at 70mph being connected to the internet?