It was even more basic than that. They were installing a child's carseat for the owner, and I believe it was an anti-theft system that was triggered.
The story reminded me a lot of the rental car that bricked itself because it lost cellular service - https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/02/driver-stranded-after-c...
I thought Ferraris were show-off cars for the rich, and if you were rich enough to have one, and had a child, then you would (sensibly) own a separate, functional car when you actually intended to drive that child around (or employ some car/chauffeur service or whatever).
Edit: I googled Ferraris with back seats, and got this article which opens by acknowledging that people don't expect them to exist or for Ferraris to be kid friendly, so I think I (and the heavily downvoted GP) can be forgiven for harboring this misconception.
>>Adam Merlin, President at Merlin Auto Group, confidently answers, “Every time I speak about Ferraris being kid friendly, people think I’m nuts. And for the most part, I am. After all, even Ferraris that do have back seats often require the rear passenger to sacrifice leg room, so you can imagine peoples’ reactions when I allude to fitting car seats back there. However, after trying a plethora of Ferrari models, I can confidently say there are models you can choose from, if you have a family and still want to spoil yourself by driving a Ferrari.”
I also think there are different definitions of "kid friendly".
Using a Ferrari to take your 3-month-old toddler to a doctors appointment? That seems like a waste.
Taking your 7 year old kid on a drive in the "fun car"? If I had a Ferrari, and a kid, this would 100% be happening.
I don't have the knowledge to get into any specifics about this. The point is just that there are plenty of valid use cases for having a child seat in a Ferrari.
But second, that doesn't matter. Most places do not have laws that prohibit children in the front seat of cars, only that they use appropriate child seats. Further, child seats are typically required for _children_, not just infants. IIRC, for example, in Texas, child seats are required for any child under the age of 8, unless they are taller than 4'9". It is totally reasonable for a 7 year old to want to go for a ride in their parents "fancy" car. It's actually very responsible of this person to get a child seat properly installed in order to support that.
The three point harness is a good compromise between the uselessness of a lap belt and the incovinience of a 5 point harness. But its certainly not as good as a 5. Point harness.
3-point belts are made to be as quick and fool proof as possible so that people actually use them, and use them correctly. Importantly, they auto-retract so that they are worn in the proper position.
When you put on 5-point belts, you have to 4 times as many latches to operate, and you have to adjust all 5 belts -- and in the proper order. If you tighten the belts in the wrong order, they won't protect you properly. It is not intuitive -- I have a car with 5-points and the passengers who manage to figure out how to latch them almost universally tighten the belts wrong.
Edit to answer my own question: apparently they use spotters that radio in to them whether or not it's clear, and (at least in NASCAR) the cars don't have side mirrors but have an extra long rear view mirror.
When I was a kid on the farm, all the transmissions in the grain trucks were modified so you could only go forward. Too many accidents driving backwards with bad sight lines. Its a strange thing at first but you get used to always parking with a forward exit.
Consider for instance the $34 million verdict in Texas against Dorel, which failed to warn against placing children under the age of two in forward-facing seats. The kid Cayden was properly restrained in the back seat, but the weight of his head alone was enough to result in spinal injuries that have left him partially paralyzed for life.
We used to laugh at my kid when kid tried to reach for things on the floor and then fell on their head due to the weight of the head relative to the rest of the body -- but that's why rear-facing and five-point is important for children under 2,3 years old.
Go look at crash tests of "child car seats" that are nothing more than a box ticking exercise which uses the adult seat, versus a properly engineering seat and you'll see what you are completely wrong.
https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/child_passenger_safet....
Actual accident data doesn't back you up...
https://www.ferrari.com/en-US/auto/gtc4lusso
But what difference does that make? Why couldn't you put a car seat in the front passenger seat of a two-seater?
But if you want to get real sad, IIRC many airbag systems are not designed with an occupant outside the parameters of a typical adult male in mind. Some modern systems are getting better about this, but if you're too short, too tall, a woman, or other-wise-outside-of-the-norm, good luck.
Equally when travelling as best I can tell all European cars have a method to do this and you can install in the front seat.
So this probably varies by country, but I am not sure which countries have what or where the USA is.
Without specifically checking I imagine that the Australian Design Rules basically wouldn't allow them to add the option even if they wanted to - if I had to guess because you're not allowed to have such a disable button (which you could argue could also be dangerous in some cases if pressed or used when it shouldn't be).
Also if you take it as exactly 5'9" then airbags aren't suitable for men either. What you need to do is examine the range it's designed for. It's not the average height that matters, it's what percent of men/women fall inside that range. There might be a significant difference in that percent, or there might not be.
According to FMVSS 208, they're tested using an unbelted 50th percentile size male dummy. That's the reason they deploy with more force and are triggered at lower impact speed had they been designed with belted occupants of varying sizes in mind.
If you unplug the cable at the bottom of a BMW seat (so it doesn't know the seat occupancy and belts) it will disable the airbag and show an airbag light.
> Buckle all children aged 12 and under in the back seat.
> - Airbags can kill young children riding in the front seat. Never place a rear-facing car seat in front of an airbag.
And, for some cars, the front seat is safer for everyone, including children, thanks to the focus on improving the safety ratings for front seat passengers (which are often advertised) [1]. For example, my car last car had side curtain airbags only in the front.
On average, especially with older cars, I assume the CDC is probably right. Their recommendations necessarily have to be the most useful for the average/masses.
1. https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/study-shows-back-s...
We're changing the child seat to front facing right now - our baby is 10 months old. It can be done little bit earlier but not too much.
> In 2018, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) released new recommendations for car seat safety. As part of these recommendations, they removed their previous age-based recommendation that children remain rear facing in car seats until the age of 2.
> The AAP now suggests that children remain rear facing until they reach their rear-facing car seat’s weight/height limits which, for most children, will leave them rear-facing beyond the previous age recommendation.
Source: https://www.healthline.com/health/childrens-health/forward-f...
Their 2011 rear facing recommendation is based on a retracted article and their 2016 rec is based on the same article's data except using a smaller dataset which they acknowledge is not statistically significant. The only other data cited looks at rear facing Swedish children compared to _unbelted_ Swedish children.
I went back and reread it to make sure I was remembering right. I'm dumbfounded that this was allowed not only to stand as a rec, but was increased (deepened? made stronger?) when they had even less data than they did before. I get that it feels like it should be safer, but that's not science and I would have expected a group making medical and safety recs to maintain a higher standard.
https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/142/5/e201824...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrari_Portofino#/media/File:...
If your car can connect to the internet it's vulnerable to hacking via the internet. My car, which is incapable of connecting to the internet suffers no such potential for abuse.
In real life is that what actually happens? Sadly, no. Car companies seem to make a lot of bone-headed systems engineering design decisions (such as having a computer network path connecting infotainment to critical safety systems)
Since an over the air update is supposed to improve your 0 to 60 times, pretty much all systems must allow to be updated and thus hardly can be airgapped.
We are just lucky we live in a world where even 'hackers' don't go that low. I hope future regulation will mandate remote access airgaps. I don't think it's a big price to pay for non-entertainment / GPS software updates to require a physical connection
Unfortunately they do go that low. There have been multiple murders committed by ransomware gangs attacking European and US hospitals in recent months. Example: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/09/patie...
The attackers knew it was a hospital network and clearly didn’t care that people would die.
Sure someone could make a dedicated secure unlock wire or something, but they don't.
Ferrari actually flew a technician in to visit this car, who then said "yep, nothing I can do here." Then they had to push it out and tow it.
The solution was not simple.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/j9qn...
If the user cannot restore it to normal operation using tools that the average user has available, that is definitely a brick though, and I'd argue that it meets even the definition of a "hard brick".
If you flash bad firmware on a device and overwrite the bootloader used for flashing, many would consider this a bricked device since they don't know how to use an SPI flasher to restore a working firmware. For others simply having a device that isnt fixable via a factory reset is bricked because they don't know how to flash via usb.
A car that has become software locked without a way to restore it is bricked imo.
Yeah, the definition is "turn it into a brick"/paperweight, hence the name. A "brick" in unrecoverable, as the name implies.
If a DRM system triggers on a car and I can't disable it its now bricked if the dealer won't come and fix it.
Because if that, I think it’s natural that the concept gets broadened.
Besides, the car might still be bricked, as far as we know? Perhaps the onboard computer is screwed and needs a replacement?
Yeah, but in this instance I feel like the language is evolving solely because it makes for better clickbait titles. "Bricked" sure sounds scarier than "temporarily unavailable".
It's just difficult and uneconomical, so isnt offered as a service
This is about as far from bricked as you can get.
They did. Because the car did not have connectivity at the time it detected the issue, it went into full lockdown (judging by the comments, it kept trying for a while, couldn't connect, assumed the worst).
The car performed exactly the way it was programmed to perform. Tampering was detected. No connectivity was found. Lockdown. It will now have to be serviced by Ferrari, a local tech is not enough.
It is difficult to imagine a system that's just as secure but less inconvenient. If you open the door for local 'patches', then you open avenues of attack. Better to do a `rm -rf *` and blow up a firmware chip or two for good measure. Threat vectors are potentially more sophisticated for these cars, if there's a way to locally bypass the lockdown, it will be found.
The target demographic for these cars will not be inconvenienced much. As per the post, the owner went and got his Maserati.
So the takeaway for any Ferrari owners is: make sure there's connectivity if you are trying to perform any changes to the vehicle.
In your example, why not have a push-button override to allow the car to reset after seat installation?
Soft-everything. I miss my hardware switches.
- signed getting grumpy, getting old man
I'm pretty sure that that's exactly what it means. What happens when someone steals the manufacturer's authentication keys, or gets on to the manufacturer's VPN?
Being able to reset a car that was immobilised due to a failure in the safety system does not mean that you can steal it, nor does it mean that you could create a dangerous situation. Resetting the system does not mean overriding. If the problem persists, the car will automatically immobilise again are the reset.
This is a very Apple-like line of thinking. It's not a valid excuse.
I don’t see how that follows? The fact that someone can remote into your car is exactly what makes it vulnerable to remote hacking.
Except the self-same failure mode means you can't bring it outside either except via an expensive process.
More generally, I don't know how any of your points should reassure anyone. Put yourself in this driver's place and tell me how dismissive you'd be at such an event.
It's not exactly straight forward to tow car that doesn't move out of the garage with such low ceiling. They had to manually release handbrake from boot and push it out of the garage.
It's only not surprising if you already know a ton about cars, which is a terrible definition of "surprising" to use here.
Uh, that should be the other way around: "The fact that the manufacturer cannot remote into their cars automatically means that the car is not vulnerable to [that form of] remote hacking."
This sounds like it invokes the "right to repair" issue though. Is this "Right to repair, but only if the car's online"?
You have the right to repair. But you do need the correct tools to do it. If you don't have those tools, Ferrari may help you remotely, but you'll need connectivity for that obviously.
I want one.
> The fact that the manufacturer can remote into their cars, does not automatically mean that the car is vulnerable to remote hacking.
I mean, it pretty much does.
The way I understand it, this car was taken in by a garage for 'seat installation'. I presume this means after market seats.
The car disabled itself during installation. The OP assumed due to an anti-temper device, but it could have been any failure mode. Most modern cars with airbags will have sensors in the seats to disable some of the airbags if there is no passenger sitting there. So it is no surprise that any type of work on the seats puts this system in an error state. Especially on high-performance cars it is not unusual that the car immobilises itself when the safety systems are in error state.
A certified dealership will have the computer interface and software to reset the fault mode. For those that do not have this software, Ferrari can remote into the car and reset it for you. This requires connectivity though. This is actually quite a common thing on luxury cars.
This has nothing to do with 'smart' modes, remote hacking capability or disabling a car while in motion. The fact that the manufacturer can remote into their cars, does not automatically mean that the car is vulnerable to remote hacking. This is, in fact, a safety system that kicked in.
The solution here was probably simple: bring the car outside, and let Ferrari do it's thing. Or trailer it to a certified dealership to have it reset there.