Is Hacking Cars a Thing of the Past?

PhotoGuy asks: "I went to install a remote car starter in our Honda last week, which used to be kind of an elegant hack (like a controlled hot-wiring of your car), only to find out that additional expensive parts and modules were required, due to the anti-theft system on the vehicle, where the car's computer would not let it start, unless it received the right code from the magnetic encoding on the key! In order to install a car starter, you have to actually put a spare key to the vehicle *in* the add-on module to let the car starter do it's thing. Yeah, that makes me more comfortable, leaving a key installed the remote car starter. That sucker went back to the store pretty quickly, that's way too much work, when a dealership can do it for me. Is the slight reduction in risk of theft of your vehicle, worth that much loss of freedom of choice and control?"

"Ever since electronic ignitions, and especially ones controlled by computers, it seems the "hackability" and user-maintainability of cars has been declining. Your neighborhood grease monkey can't do much to a modern car without a bunch of electronic gear interfacing to the car's computer. It's almost a little anti-competitive.

Carbeurators, and the other mechanical systems which were fairly standard and visible and self-evident, really seem to be the equivalent of "open source", while the new computer-based systems seem to be more closed and proprietary. I know in the early days of cars with computers, there were third party ROM upgrades for performance tweaking; I'm guessing that's falling by the wayside more and more, as these systems get more and more complex.

It almost seems like a Microsoft-like statement, to tell you they're doing all of this to reduce theft, while really they're doing it to ensure you are forced into coming back to their dealerships..."

Comments

other ignition technologies

[SirSlud]

well, I, for one, don't mind losing that kind of 'freedom and control' if it helps the deployment of ignition technologies to keep non-safe drivers out of cars: breathalizer, driver licence check, etc

to me, it is absolutely criminal that cars are not mandated to have at least some level of drunkdriving prevention. dunno if that would get in the way of alternative security systems, but if it does .. well, lets just say that the average human is a little too attached to their car in the first place :)

Some cars are more hackable, e.g. VW

[Malc]

My Passat has the same 1.8T engine that is used from Jettas/Golfs all the way up to Audi TTs. The computer chip that controls the engine is programmed to de-tune it compared with the Audis. Some of the things the chip does is control maximum turbo pressure, etc. Considering the price difference, I guess they don't want performance equality between VW and Audi. My Passat only gets 150hp, whereas the TT gets 225hp from the same engine. Seeing as some many components are shared with Audi, the car can easily take these changes. Another common hack is getting the tiptronic transmission re-programmed to modify the shift points and the time it takes to shift.

There is a big market in reprogramming or replacement ECM chips... I can easily get another 40hp and perhaps better millege by going down this route. The hp can be increased further with turbo replacements, etc, but apparently, you start having to make other big changes for the car to handle 200+hp.

Take a look around http://www.clubb5.com/ for some ideas... these B5 Passats are very hackable. Whether it's just plugging a laptop into the VAG-COM thing and re-programming the locks, or wiring in new tools like The Alien, or putting in Xenon lights and the Audi sport suspension.

Re:Step back and think about it.

[Y2K is bogus]

You obviously don't know what you're talking about. Every advancement in car tuning has come at the hands of some VERY smart people. Ford doesn't publish information on how to tune their cars. Niether does GM, or Audi, or Volkswagen, or Honda, or Subaru, or BMW. All of these computers have been hacked in the truest sense of the word. There are people with logic analyzers sniffing the bus of running computers to figure out what's happening. People write emulators and disassemblers to understand where all the tables, functions, and scalars are.

OBD-II has made it a lot easier to hack computers, but the tuning of the engine is still an art practiced by people who have learned A LOT and still don't know everything. It's rare to find an aftermarket engine that is tuned to the quality of the OEM engine, it just doesn't happen all that often.

So what happens? There are several companies who manufacture aftermarket drop-in computers for controlling engine functions. For Fords SpeedBrain and the Ford SVO EPEC come to mind. For race cars the Edelbrock EFI, Accel DFI, Speedpro, and Motronic are used often. The upside to the aftermarket is that you get documentation and they rarely are as complex as OEM computers.

Here's a list off the top of my head of sensors and functions a Ford EEC-IV computer controls:

Mass Air Flow Sensor, Barometric pressure sensor, Throttle Position Sensor, Engine Coolant Temperature sensor, Air Charge Temperature sensor, O2 sensor, Vehicle Speed Sensor, Exhaust Gas Recirculator valve, Canister Purge Valve, Thermactor Control Valve, Thick Film Ignition module, Idle Stabilizer Valve, Automatic transmission accumulator pressure, 1st to 2nd gear shift point, 2nd to 3rd gear shift point, 3rd to 4th gear shift point, Torque Converter lockup RPM, Idle RPM, Automatic Transmission Drive Idle RPM, Neutral indicator, etc.

That's just sensors and some basic interactions. Most aftermarket computers don't use half those sensors, and on top of that they are usually Manifold Absolute Pressure based rather than Mass Air Flow.

So, as you can see, it isn't "Just buy a book". I have every book on Ford EFI, and none of them tell you the slightest thing about tuning an EEC-IV computer. Everything I've learned has been from the internet (there are enthusiasts who hack and document their hacks) and from hacking.

I've been there, I've done computer tweaking, and I know it's not simple or trivial, it's all just hacking and guesswork.