EV Sales Sticking Point: People Still Want Manual Transmissions

Call me crazy, but I’m ride or die for manual transmissions. I drove enough go-karts and played enough Pole Position as a kid to know that shifting the gears yourself …read more Continue reading EV Sales Sticking Point: People Still Want Manual Transmissions

Electric Vehicles Continue the Same Wasteful Mistakes That Limit Longevity

A while back, I sat in the newish electric car that was the pride and joy of a friend of mine, and had what was at the time an odd experience. Instead of getting in, turning the key, and driving off, the car instead had to boot up.

The feeling …read more

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What Happens to Tesla When the Sleeping Auto Giants Awake?

The history of automotive production is littered with the fallen badges of car companies that shone brightly but fell by the wayside in the face of competition from the industry’s giants. Whether you pine for an AMC, a Studebaker, or a Saab, it’s a Ford or a Honda you’ll be …read more

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Electric Cars Sound Off, Starting July 1st

By and large, automakers have spent much of the last century trying to make cars quieter and more comfortable. Noise from vehicles can be disruptive and just generally annoying, so it makes sense to minimise it where possible.

However, the noise from the average motor vehicle can serve a useful …read more

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Power struggle: Government-funded researchers investigate vulnerabilities in EV charging stations

Charging stations for electric cars have sprung up across the country in recent years as hybrid vehicles continue to gain popularity. As those stations carry more wattage, their potential effect on local power flows has grown. The trend caught the eye of researchers at a top government cybersecurity lab, who have embarked on a multiyear project to learn how hacking a charging station might disrupt the quality and flow of power through a local grid.   Kenneth Rohde, a cybersecurity researcher at the Idaho National Laboratory, explained the project to a room of engineers and hard-hat hackers at the S4 Conference last month in Miami. In a video, Rohde approached a charging station and ran an attack on the human machine interface (HMI), which affects the charging process by communicating with a control system. “Now you’ll see this power meter is jumping all over the place,” Rohde said. He executed […]

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Schneider Electric’s car charging stations get crucial patches

Schneider Electric recently patched three security flaws in a popular type of electric-car charger that it manufactures, vulnerability assessment company Positive Technologies said Monday. The most serious of the vulnerabilities in the EVlink charging stations involved hard-coded credentials, meaning the units were shipped with default passwords or security keys embedded in their firmware. If hackers discover such credentials in any type of device, they can use them to gain wide access to them. Schneider and Positive Technologies labeled that flaw as “critical,” saying an intruder could halt the charging process and switch it into “reservation mode,” making a station unusable to anyone until the mode is turned off. Hackers could even control the socket locking hatch, letting them unlock and “walk away with the cable,” Positive Technologies said. A second vulnerability, rated as “high-risk,” allows for an attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the station and gain maximum privileges. And another vulnerability labeled as “medium” risk would let an attacker bypass authorization and access a […]

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