sweet!

 

Hard to believe anything anymore. If not this then they will nail us some other way. Good sign tho

 

While modern computers and software have made cars safer than ever, hackers have revealed just how easy it can be to remotely take over a vehicle. The exemption will also give owners the ability to check their own cars for security vulnerabilities without visiting a dealership.

I guess now the aftermarket companies will have more incentive to try to crack new CPU's.

 

How so? They only crack ECUs so that they can sell tunes for them, which has never actually been considered illegal. That's their only incentive (which they no doubt call a "necessary evil") for it and it hasn't changed.

 

I wonder why they thought that being a "mobile computing device" would be a compelling argument to making it illegal to modify the software. It's not inherently illegal in any way to modify the software in actual mobile computing devices like tablets or cell phones. It might void the warranty of the device (just as modifying the software of your ECU is in fact legitimate and legal grounds to void the warranty on the powertrain of a vehicle), but it's not illegal. However, this only addresses legality from the perspective of intellectual property, and does not address whether modifying vehicle software might be made illegal on other grounds. After Volkswagen's debacle with their diesel engines, I'm surprised the US government (particularly the EPA) isn't proposing making it much more difficult and much less legal to modify vehicle software.

 

Tuning your engine is still illegal under EPA rules. Tuners have gotten around it by hiding behind the "For Off-road Use Only". That is why the EPA tried to push through new rules that would make it illegal to modify a vehicle for off road use if it had been originally certified for Street use. Fortunately SEMA got enough signatures to squash that and to push through the RPM law that ensures that you can modify vehicles for off road use.

Dave

 

It's only illegal to tamper with emission control systems, and has been for many years. Tuning your car does not inherently do that, and the "off-road use only" label is usually only applied to products that would do so (or would otherwise be illegal for on-road use, of course). No aftermarket parts maker is going to limit their ability to market their products by labeling something for off-road use only unless they really have a good reason to.

 

Decisions made by any corporation are about the idea of making more money. That's all corporations care about. They don't care about their own employees, their product, or their customers. They care about their stock prices and bonuses. It's greed at it's finest.

So whenever some company says a decision was based on safety....that's a lie. It's more about protecting themselves from being sued.

 

i have been tuning my car much longer then that anyways. i dont give a damn about a stupid law. this is why i do like Ford. they do not have this dumb encryption on their ECUs. i have seen the new NA focus with bolt ons hitting 210whp. its crazy guy was beating STs, lol.