We finch at the idea of handing of the myriad joys of the open road to a self-driving vehicle, so perhaps we should celebrate the news that Google and others are becoming increasingly sensitive to the possibility that there are potential hacking vulnerabilities. John Krafcik, CEO of Waymo, Google’s driverless vehicle programme, recently told the UK’s Financial Times that Google’s self-driving cars will remain unplugged from the internet “most of the W time”, so “there isn’t a continuous line that’s able to be hacked, going into the car”. Given the need to communicate with infrastructure and other vehicles, however, they can’t eliminate external connections entirely.
In 2015, in a controlled demonstration, two hackers usurped the electronics of a Jeep Cherokee’s UConnect system from 10 miles away, able to do everything from…
