Hacker and founder of comma.ai, George Hotz, has announced the launch of an $88 accessory for hacking your vehicle.
Dubbed panda, the accessory is a universal car interface that supports 3 CAN, 2 LIN, and 1 GMLAN. It plugs into the OBDII port on every car made since 1996. Panda can also charge a phone and on the computer side, it has both USB and Wi-Fi.
"In order to get the reliability and throughput we needed to make cars self driving, we started building our own interface hardware. When we gave away the plans for our first self driving hardware, we included a custom car interface board. It interfaced two CANs with USB. But some cars needed more. So we built panda."
Hotz also announced several programs that work with panda including cabana, a comma.ai CAN analysis tool.
CAN bus analysis is what allows you to make sense of all the sensors and signals in your car. Aside from CANalyzer, which is a $10,000 proprietary Windows only tool, there is no good software for CAN analysis. Today, with the launch of comma cabana, this changes. We’ve set our app team loose on building the best CAN analysis tool to ever exist to complement our panda hardware. And I think they’ve succeeded.
Guys... is there anything that you won't trust to some guy on the internet? Doesn't seem highly irresponsible to essentially give access to your car's functions to a completely unaccountable individual? I'm not saying anything bad about GeoHot, I'm just saying that a rational person should have very low confidence about doing this. Sheesh. And hey... let's see if people can disagree can do so in a polite, rational way.
Oh, I totally get it, and that's my concern. To answer your question, I trust carmakers more than I trust YOU or other random people that may decide to tinker around with their car's operating system.
You CANNOT hack you car with this device. It's just like all the other ODBII devices out there. The only difference is that it supports more interfaces. That's it. It reads data. You CANNOT HACK your car with this.
You might be right but is it just your feeling or you have tried it and conclude this. This guy (Geo) has make some pretty incredible things in the past.