My initial reaction when I heard about autonomous cars a few years back was that they sounded amazingly cool and would be much safer than vehicles guided by human drivers. My second thought was that a terrorist–or just a bored teen–would ultimately be able to make a few thousand vehicles turn left simultaneously when they should be turning right. From “The Rise of Car Hacking” by Jeremy Laird at the Independent:

“Charlie Miller, a security engineer at Twitter, and Chris Valasek, director of security intelligence at security firm IOActive, aimed to increase awareness of car hackability by hooking up a Nintendo game-console controller to a US-market Ford Escape SUV.

They were able to accelerate, brake and steer as though they were playing a video game. Except this wasn’t a game. It was a very real two-tonne SUV and it had been comprehensively hacked. Miller and Valasek also wired into a Toyota Prius hybrid car using a laptop computer and took control of several safety-critical systems including the brakes.

If there is a good news angle to this, it’s that those exploits, along with the BMW thefts, all require physical access to cars. Where things get really worrying is the potential for wireless attacks. What if the bad guys could compromise your car as easily as they take over your laptop’s web browser? And do it from behind a computer screen hundreds or thousands of miles away?”