Home
Help
Search
Login
Register
Recent Posts1
Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff / Re: A naive question about automotive CANbus sniffing and spoofing
« Last post by xrunner on Today at 11:47:12 am »Some background: My wife and I are in the market for a car, possibly a Subaru Outback. We'd be happy buying used, especially if we could obtain one of the elusive manual transmissions which are very hard to find now in the US. But the used market is still weird, and buying new may be a better value. We've test-driven the 2024 Outback and mostly like it, but the "infotainment" system is a potential show-stopper for us. Subaru have moved to an 11" touchscreen with fairly limited tactile controls. In particular, most of the climate controls are touchscreen only.
Apart from the obvious stupidity of driver-operated touchscreen controls, we both feel like the infotainment could be an expensive time bomb. We try to drive our cars into the ground, at least 300,000 km and hopefully longer. What happens 15-20 years down the road when something in the infotainment gives out? We can live without a radio, but not without heat/AC. This touchscreen madness is infecting multiple car brands and increasingly hard to avoid.
Hey Mark. I just bought a 2024 Subaru Crosstrek Wilderness a few weeks ago. It has the same display you are talking about. The Crosstrek I had before (2017 model) had more of the controls as physical knobs, so some of this touch screen design I had to get used to. Some parts of the design I like other parts I don't, but what are you going to do? I used to work on my cars back in the day in high school when things were simpler, but I won't touch a lot of it anymore.
I was looking around at how it was built, and you can see a module in the engine bay with two giant cables going to it. Is it a compute module for the engine? I haven't tried to find out but the point is the thing is a complex compute device on four wheels, just like most of the new cars out there now. I don't think I'm telling you anything you don't know already. I'm just saying you probably are going to have to buy an older vehicle if you are worried about the touch screen going bad. Me I'm not worrying about it. It's a part that can be replaced just like any other in the vehicle, so it doesn't bother me.
