The key here is what you do BETWEEN age four and age sixteen. Kids need to learn how to handle all sorts of situations on their own. A parent would be unwise to hover closely, then at age 16, say "Here's the car keys, drive safely!" It takes years to build up to that point. Relying on the short-term "security" of GPS trackers only delays the day the child is ready to go solo into the wide world.

Brian Contos has something to sell you and isn't afraid to use FUD to better his chances. The CNN reporter isn't very good either -- obviously he understands buzzwords but not automotive electronics. Here's the deal... Your car built since the 1990s is loaded with at least a dozen embedded microprocessors, probably more. However, it is likely that at most two are running a mainstream operating system such as Linux or (much as I hate to say this) some form of MS Windows. Those two the "infotainment" and telematics or hands-free phone units. Everything else is a closed, closed, closed system. Even to reflash most automotive electronics requires specialized knowledge and equipment. This is done to keep 3rd party replacement gear out of the car as much as anything else.

So the risks come down to a) unusual combinations of inputs that cause unexpected consequences and b) downloadable apps. You can bet that the auto companies are working hard to prevent the first. If there's ever an "app store" for some car electronics, it will be far more tightly controlled than what's out there for smartphones, again as much for control of what gets into the vehicle as for security. Not that I would personally care to "compute-ify" my car, thank you.

The failures of TFA are that the McAfee guy is applying desktop OS assumptions to embedded systems, and the CNN reporter didn't actually talk to any car guys.

Most of the concerns in this thread have been answered many times in hybrid vehicle and hypermiling forums. But just to address a couple...

Car batteries are sized for a cycle of rapid discharge (seconds), followed by moderate recharge while driving (minutes to hours), followed by very slow discharge when the engine is off (hours to weeks). The details are the secret sauce of electrical system design, hard to find out even from inside the auto industry. One would expect an engine start-stop car to have a larger battery and alternator than a conventional car. One consequence of this typical charge-discharge pattern is that any vehicle driven only on ten-minute trips is guaranteed to have battery problems.

Other facts of life (analysis available from EPA, no less) are that cruising at a steady speed is the highest-mileage mode of any car, while stop-and-go traffic gives the lowest mileage. Successful hybrids have features to deal with both of these extremes of fuel consumption. The start-stop system obviously deals with one aspect of the latter.

Alfred P. Sloan has been dead for 44 years.

I remember news stories from fall 1999. People were seriously concerned that gas, electricity and water utilities would fail, planes would crash, cars would stall and Social Security payments would not get made. Some acquaintances didn't like it when I pointed out that from the first time the Social Security Administration began automating, it had to deal with people born in the 19th century and others would not retire until the 21st. Hospitals replaced medical equipment that could not be certified as Y2K-compatible, instead of testing to see whether there would be any problem.

It got so bad that some New York buildings halted their elevators before the fateful midnight, and the U.S. Secretary of Transportation was riding on a commercial flight at midnight on December 31.

Those of us who wrote software for these machines just laughed and repeated the mantra, "Embedded systems programmers don't use COBOL."

Agreeing with the commenter up-thread, it really is just proprietary stuff. Fred Von Lohmann, usually an astute guy, gets it wrong this time.

Back around 2000 I did some work on diagnostic tools. Engine- and emissions-related trouble codes are industry standard as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). There are plenty of tools that will read these trouble codes. Where it gets interesting is that in various cars, the communication hardware could be UART-based, PWM, in the last few years, mostly CAN, but there were others.

A decade ago, I think it was under a consent decree, the 3 Detroit auto companies had to make diagnostic information available after one year. This being the auto industry, through incestuous business relationships one company got to collect the information, and of course they were the only source for the second year, and after that your friendly neighborhood repair shop could get the information from several sources.

The thing about vehicle buses is that they carry a lot more information besides diagnostics, and this "everything else" is held pretty closely by the auto companies. Dealers get access to at least some of it because repairs are where the cash flow is. Also, making warranty repairs quicker helps the auto companies keep their costs down.

Slashdot readers should realize that the world of embedded software inside the car has very little in common with desktop computing; automotive electronics resemble distributed systems more and more every year; and the shadetree mechanic is SOL these days.

Interesting! a) 3 of the 16 pictures are of cars made by American companies, if you count the Jaguars (Ford) and separately count two pics of pickup trucks, b) the racetrack image is from a Nissan plant in the UK, and 3) Slashdot readers once again race to conclusions. Unless, of course, the parent poster thinks American bailout policy should follow the lead of American manufacturing policy.