I’m driving a new Chrysler Sebring convertible right now. The weather is beautiful so I leave the top down when parking for an hour or two, putting my bags in the trunk for safe keeping. I walk away from the car. I click the “lock” button on the remote. Now the car’s computer systems know that I have walked away from the car and said “lock it up”. How secure is my stuff in the trunk? A perpetrator can walk up to the car, touch the trunk release button on the left side of the dashboard, and the trunk will pop open withou sounding an alarm.
Two lines of software in any of the microprocessors filling this car could have prevented this security risk. Do we want to give people who engineer products like this $50 billion of taxpayer money to play with?
[Recession Tip: In the pre-Meltdown days I splurged on Hertz #1 Gold, which would have cost about $90 per day for this car. This rental came from 30 seconds of comparison shopping on Expedia and cost $32 per day.]
No wonder that the car industry is now in trouble! Most of them are huge, rusting enterprises making efforts to focus on internal improvements but not listen to thei customers. Like you mentioned the dashboard experience at GM.
Similar, I did look in Romania for a car that should have a decent GPS incorporated because I didn’t want to use my PDA or another external specialized system for this. A waste a time because all the so fancy cars (german manufacters of japanese) beside having huge prices for such cheap systems (starting 2000 EUR) they do not provide the country’s map (probably I should buy a car here to travel in Spain with it 🙂 ). That means that the automotive software is at best in the ’90.
Probably no software company would resist so long having with prices and one product with periodical facelifts (and with no *real* new products).
I would like you to check another “two lines of code” feature in this car. This is something I have been kvetching about for a long time.
Turn on the Hazard lights, as if you are at the side of the road at night and want to notify other drivers that you are there.
Now, say you want to get back to the road and you use the left turn signal.
Does the car indicate in any way that the hazard lights are still blinking and that the other drivers cannot know you are actually returning to the road?