Click and Clack Search for Cars of the Future

I’ve been a big fan of Click and Clack for years, in this full edition of NOVA they examine the cars of the future. They look at the horsepower phenomenon, and how SUV’s are the new station wagons to start with and then travel to Iceland to look at Hydrogen cars.

Click and Clack Search for Cars of the Future

I’ve been a big fan of Click and Clack for years, in this full edition of NOVA they examine the cars of the future. They look at the horsepower phenomenon, and how SUV’s are the new station wagons to start with and then travel to Iceland to look at Hydrogen cars.

Also I”m not too happy with Amory Lovins, anti-nuclear kook in this, but what he has to say about car weight vs strength is true.

Automakers Get 17.4 Billion of Our Money

I’m a confirmed, committed capitalist but the bailout of Detroit is not capitalism at all — it’s corporate socialism, or you could call it Union Welfare as well. This is sickening beyond belief so I will reprint the new Chrysler/GM/Ford ad,

I’m a confirmed, committed capitalist but the 17.4 billion dollar bailout of Detroit is not capitalism at all — it’s corporate socialism, or you could call it Union Welfare as well. This is sickening beyond belief so I will reprint the new Chrysler/GM/Ford ad, h/t Virginia Postrel:

bigthree

Update: the Term sheet for GM bailout. (.PDF link)

Update: Ford is not getting bailed out, hat’s off to them, and perhaps my next car purchase will be a Ford, although that’s sacrilege in this family.

Locking Your Car

I received this in email from Wildbeggar, and I don’t know if it’s reliable info or not but I will dig into it since it does sound plausible. (If wardrivers can tap wifi by hacking WEP, wouldn’t this be easier?)

Something to think about with the holidays coming.

I locked my car, and as I walked away I heard my car door unlock. I went back and locked my car again three times. I looked around and there were two guys sitting in a car in the fire lane next to the store. When I looked straight at them they did not unlock my car again.

How to lock your car safely:

While traveling, my son stopped at a roadside park. He came out to his car less than five minutes later and found someone had gotten into his car and stolen his cell phone, laptop computer, GPS navigator briefcase … you name it.

He called the police and, since there were no signs of his car being broken into, the police told him that there is a device that robbers are using now to clone your security code when you lock the doors on your car using your key-chain locking device.

They sit a distance away and watch for their next victim. They know you are going inside of the store, restaurant or bathroom and have a few minutes to steal and run.

The police officer said to be sure to manually lock your car door by hitting the lock button inside the car. That way if there is someone sitting in a parking lot watching for their next victim it will not be you.

When you hit the lock button on your car upon exiting it does not send the security code, but if you walk away and use the door lock on your key chain it sends the code through the airwaves where it can be stolen, something totally new to us.

Be aware of this. Pass this note on.

Look how many times we all lock our doors with our keys, just to be sure we remembered to lock them, and bingo someone has our code, and whatever was in the car can be gone.

Here’s what Snopes.com has to say:

It is theoretically possible for a very determined thief armed with the right technology and the ability to manipulate it correctly to snatch a keycode from the air and use it to enter a vehicle. However, the complexity and length of time involved in that process means your typical crook can’t simply grab an RKE code in a parking lot and open up the corresponding car within a minute or two: the would-be thief would need specialized knowledge and equipment and would have to spend hours (if not days) crunching data and replicating a device to produce the correct entry code, then hope he could locate the same vehicle again once all the other steps had been completed. (In most parking lot scenarios, the target car would be long gone before the putative thief was able to open it.)

So it’s theoretically possible, that makes it possible to probable that the capability can be created. Again I will point out that wardriver hackers have demonstrably broken the encryption on WEP and other WIFI encryption methods in minutes, not hours. [ I haven’t kept up since last time they cracked it, but you can research the latest here, and yes, they’ve cracked WEP’s replacement as well, but for the life of me I can’t remember the acronym to link it right now. ]

It’s easy to get in the habit of clicking the button in your armrest. When you do you get the added benefit of not making a beep or toot-weet sound that used to be a status symbol sound of a car with special features but which is now just commonplace.