...and every Jihadi is our government's wet dream to use as propaganda for endless war... that generates Jihadis. Think about the big picture next time.

Unless they are tightly locked down by the manufacturers. Perhaps jihadis will not be able to hack them in such a way as to take remote control, and perhaps the manufacturers will eventually make the automatic not-plowing-into-pedestrian system override driver controls.

Yes, no system is perfectly unhackable, but since terrorist cells tend to be small and relatively isolated I could see it being the case that the people who want to use cars as remote weapons would not be people who have the time and talent to make that happen.

State-sponsored groups may be a different story of course.

> Perhaps jihadis will not be able to hack them in such a way as to take remote control.

That is wishful thinking. Islamic State has been very successful in recruiting and radicalizing young english speaking hackers in Europe -- mostly in Britain (children of Pakistani immigrants), Belgium (2nd generation Moroccans) and France (descendants of french-algerian immigrants).

Here's one that I know of. British-Pakistani hacker Junnaid Hussain => See "Here’s how the military tracked down and killed the top hacker for ISIS" http://www.businessinsider.com/isis-hacker-trick-found-2016-...

> Hussain, a high profile recruiter for ISIS who hacked CENTCOM’s Twitter and YouTube accounts, was considered the second ranked British jihadi behind Mohammed Emwazi (Jihadi John). Hussain was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Syria in August 2015.

Source: http://www.foreigndesknews.com/world/middle-east/isis-hacker...

Junaid was know for his hacking skills, he used to publish "Kill Lists" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junaid_Hussain

So, he essentially tricked some social media manager into giving him a password (probably the same used for both). That's even weaker than I expected.

Read you some Kevin Mitnick. 'Social engineering' as he calls it is very effective as an intrusion technique.

I don't understand it but a large percentage of fundamentalist terrorists were engineering/science majors in college, so I wouldn't count on them not having expertise. Also batting for non Islamic homegrown terrorism, Timothy McVeigh was a programmer in his teens, and the Unabomber was a child prodigy, starting college two years early.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.h...

Anyone care to explain the down votes? The threat of Jihadis using self-driving cars is a very real one.

Recently a plot was unearthed , and thwarted, in London. A state sponsored actor with ties to ISIS branch in Libya was trying to start a self-driving car rental agency.

why would they want a self driving car, and not just a car?

Not OP, but I think the idea is that the Jihadis no longer need to "sacrifice" their "martyrs" in car suicide bombing missions.

They could - in theory - pack a self-driving car or worse, a truck , with explosives and remote control drive it into a crowd of "infidels".

Rinse repeat in various cities.