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Comment by birken | Hacker News Reader

The driver is always responsible for what their vehicle does. As long as the driver can override the steering (which they can), then there is really nothing to be concerned about. This is the same for cars using openpilot, or Tesla's self driving systems or any other steering assistance features.

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> As long as the driver can override the steering (which they can)

EPS is much more powerful than humans. It can apply huge torque and cause incredibly fast acceleration of the steering wheel (from full lock on one side to the other in a split second). Messing with the firmware definitely could cause a situation where the car just does whatever it wants to and the driver can do nothing about it.

The steering rack is probably toast in this video, but the "unloaded" maximum speed is still impressive: https://youtu.be/L6-nJSCmo1c

This seems like a bit of an over-simplification.. A car needs to be type approved to run on our streets and the insurance companies need to accept whatever you did to the car in case of a crash. You don't really want to end up paying 100% yourself when you crash into that school bus with your mod.

However it would be interesting to learn how type approvals handle the self-driving things. Maybe they really do allow all kinds of computer-assisted things? I don't know. If you change some structural beams in the car you surely lose approval. But can you mod steering and braking? What about openpilot users that crash?

You can do a thought experiment where some esoteric firmware modification results in an accident, but it's 1000x more likely that Joe Sixpack spaces out while driving, runs a red light, and crashes into a busload of kids. Once we've solved that problem, drunk driving, distracted driving, poor driver education, and thus eliminated 99.9% of accidents, then it might make sense to have a debate about those pesky car modders or edge-case Tesla autopilot failures that are responsible for the last 0.01%.

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