OK, that’s not true... but with ever more sophisticated vehicle electronics and connectivity, could it happen in the near future?

You’re driving along a motorway at 75mph, listening to a soporific tune by Phil Collins. Understandably, this makes you a bit dozy and your car wanders over the centre lane markers.

Your car’s sensors detect this, and because you haven’t used your indicators it assumes this isn’t a deliberate move and warns you with a buzzer. If you don’t respond accordingly, other electronics step in and gently nudge the steering so that you return to the proper lane.

Another scenario: your car senses that you are closing rather rapidly on the vehicle in front, so it warns you. For whatever reason you ignore this and the gigantic brain in your car decides, without any input from you at all, to apply maximum braking force, right into the anti-lock mode.

Same deal with Adaptive Cruise Control. You’ve set the cruise to 70mph and as you approach a knot of slower moving traffic, the car slows itself to maintain a set distance to the car ahead. That car moves into the left lane and its clear in front – as your car has slowed itself to 40mph and the lane is now clear, it accelerates back up to 70mph. You, the driver, haven’t touched a single pedal.

Not very long ago at all, this would have been the preserve of science fiction, but the three scenarios described here are current features available on any number of high-end cars. Cars that can be braked, accelerated and steered without any input from the driver.

It’s an issue that is getting increasing attention – and concern – from scientists worried that car’s electronic systems could be subjected to cyber attacks. And the latest electric vehicles – and all those about to come to market – are just as vulnerable.

In a report by Bloomberg, Adrian Lund, the president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety said: "There clearly is a vulnerability. All these electronics we're bringing into cars seem to exacerbate that."

Another computer science professor in California, Stefan Savage, said that car thieves could potentially exploit security weaknesses to remotely open and start a car. Savage co-authored a paper last year after uncovering ways to hack into cars.

It isn’t hard to imagine the terror of being hijacked by an unseen force. Your car starts accelerating hard, not responding to your frantic efforts to brake. Or you suddenly find yourself with maximum braking as you speed in the fast lane on a motorway. Or worse, the steering is tugging you to the right, into oncoming traffic.

It’s important at this point to stress that this is all hypothetical, that it isn’t happening. A recent conference of automotive engineers in Washington DC concluded that there’s no immediate worry that a hacker could commandeer a car and create mayhem. But they did say that it’s probably a good idea to spot vulnerabilities while they are still hypothetical.

And it’s also really important to say that automotive electronics have been a massive force for good, especially on the safety front. Electronic traction control and stability control on their own have likely saved many thousands of lives. Volvo has even said that its target for 2020 is that nobody ever dies in one of its cars ever again. That’ll be the electronics.

But I can’t quite shake the ‘what if?’. I was reading the other day about an iPhone app that lets you start and unlock your car from just about anywhere in the world, as long as you can get a 3G signal.

What could possibly go wrong?

About Gavin Conway

Gavin has been writing about cars and the industry for nearly 20 years. He started out on Autocar magazine before a stint as editor of Classic & Sportscar. Freelancing followed – he has been writing for The Sunday Times for over a decade, even during his three-year posting as editor of Channel 4’s motoring site 4Car. Gavin also took a year out to edit Automobile magazine in America before returning to the UK. He is now steering the ship at TheChargingPoint.com as Editor-in-Chief.

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