[Carriage Hill]

This ABCNews article about car hackers has a few interesting sentences in it:

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/hackers-grab-car/story?id=20105078

<—SNIP—>

“A Terrifying Turn

While it’s unsettling to have your car invaded or stolen while you’re on a Labor Day trip with your family, it’s not life threatening. What scares me is when a car hacker evolves from messing with your doors to invading your car’s computer system.

The possibility of this even stranger and more dangerous crime is lurking on the horizon. Most modern cars use computers to control everything from engine compression to cruise control, airbags and brakes. Those computers communicate with each other on open networks. Using an $80,000 grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), two researchers recently hacked the onboard computers of a Toyota Prius and a Ford Escape SUV.

They made the Prius accelerate and brake, as well as jerk the wheel while traveling at high speeds. They managed to turn the Ford’s steering wheel at low speeds and disable the brakes, which caused researcher Charlie Miller to drive the SUV into his garage and totally destroy his own lawnmower. This is the stuff of nightmares.

“Once you are through that initial barrier, you can and will be able to do almost anything you want to,” security researcher Don Bailey recently told NPR.”

[Hot Tabasco]

This ABCNews article about car hackers has a few interesting sentences in it:

You're certainly right, unfortunately there's no mention of his drug abuse........but what the heck, a conspiracy is always more fun to discuss

[MeshugeMikey]

I sense that we are at the dwan of QUITE an “interesting” era!

some for good some not so much....

[bitterohiogunclinger]

This is only partially true, and contains many out and out false statements. The “hacking” of car automotive systems that continually is referenced in this and similar articles involved connecting a laptop inside the vehicle and attacking the vehicles control systems. Researchers were able to take control of many systems, including braking, transmission, radio, door locks and even engine acceleration and performance.
The key concept here is that they had a computer plugged in physically to the data port in the car.
There has been documented cases that access to the vehicles systems can be hacked into wirelessly through means such as Bluetooth, cellular, and even sending false wireless tire pressure signals, the key is that these attacks have only disrupted the normal function of the cars systems, not taken control of them.
Don Bailey, the person who is quoted in the article appears to have some of his facts misrepresented. No passenger vehicles currently are allowed to use steer by wire systems.
Even the active park assist systems work by modifying the normal power steering “assist”, but there is at heart still a conventional “mechanical” linkage between the steering wheel and a rack and pinion system that controls where the front wheels are pointed at any given time.
Bottom line, I think that talk of remotely taking control and causing a crash is improbable.