How to hack a self-driving car – Physics World

Cars that drive themselves may one day improve road safety by reducing human error – and hopefully deaths by accidents too. One morning in March 2019, a brand new, cherry-red Tesla Model 3 sat in front of a Sheraton hotel in Vancouver, Canada. Once they were inside the car, Amat Cama and Richard Zhu, both tall and lean twentysomethings, needed only a few minutes. They exploited a weakness in the browser of the "infotainment" system to get inside one of the car's computers. Then they used the system to run a few lines of their own code, and soon their commands were appearing on the screen. Cama and Zhu got the car, but they weren't thieves.