Obviously, the chances of that are virtually zero. But they'd rather make their product worse than assume with any kind of risk, even if it is virtually zero. That is simply the way in which German enterprises operate.
If their APIs are done correctly, they shouldn't be afraid to expose them.
When they leave the "security" to the platform they can blame them in a lawsuit.
This is... obviously not true?
If you could (somehow) meaningfully damage a car via the app, do you think VW wouldn't be liable because of the Google Play developer ToS?
[]: everything may very well not be a thing but people like to pretend it is
Maybe they rather be lazy and be able to shift blame, even without much legal recourse.
Same way that banking apps don’t care if you could screw up your account anyway, they will ban rooted phones just to avoid the risk. Because when something happens, what do you think is more likely? That the customer accepts full responsibility for using a rooted device and says that’s on me? Or that they blame the bank for losing all their savings?
Laws mostly don't work like that. The seller of gasoline doesn't have to prove they did everything possible to design the product to prevent anyone from using it for arson, nor should they because that's preposterous.
> Because when something happens, what do you think is more likely? That the customer accepts full responsibility for using a rooted device and says that’s on me? Or that they blame the bank for losing all their savings?
You're making the assumption that rooted phones are more likely to be compromised, but it's entirely the opposite. The stock software on phones regularly goes out of support and has known unpatched vulnerabilities (but will still pass Play Protect) and the only way to get a patched system on that device is to install a newer third party ROM. On top of that, GrapheneOS has better security than stock Android even for the same version.
Moreover, that has nothing to do with liability. When the user with the vendor-supplied firmware still gets pwned and has their account drained, they're still going to go to the bank looking to get their money back. All the bank does by going out of their way to block third party firmware is to make that marginally more likely.
They should be doing this anyways, or else you end up with your Jeep being crashed via wifi [0], and having the blast radius of a corrupt album image [1] restricted to infotainment is probably a really good idea too.
[0]: https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/blackhat-jeep-cherokee-hack-e...
[1]: https://www.theregister.com/software/2022/02/10/radio-statio...
Maybe I have to ask that guy some questions....
Clearly the engineering team didn't know ahead of time that Electrify America would be the end result of dieselgate. Had they known, perhaps they would have been more eager to do the engineering work though! haha
It was just a fun inside joke, since nobody could have assumed the fines would create Electrify America. Personally I'm glad Electrify America exists, though the way it happened was probably not the best path to get here.
EA even has successfully moved on from just being an org forced into existence and are actively trying to take care of customers and produce a good product now that they have some competition.
In fact, that's how a lot of compliance works in industries where there's little little enforcement and relies a lot on self regulation.
But the reality is that every once in a while you have a scandal like this or something like Wirecard, and it happens, because the culture is such that absolutely nobody thinks it possible. That includes officials and regulators whose first instinct will often be to come after the people trying to expose the scandal, as has happened in the case of Wirecard.
Only naive laymen or newcomers to Germany think it's not possible. German business leaders, lawyers and politicians know exactly how much corruption and scamming is going on in the business sector, and it's not a little.
>first instinct will often be to come after the people trying to expose the scandal, as has happened in the case of Wirecard.
That was purely malicious to try to protect Wirecard, not because the regulators couldn't possibly imagine corruption and law breaking exists, that was the story they used as cover for their corruption.
Like you're a regulator and instead of doing the thing you were hired for and look at the evidence The Economist showed you, you instead "use your instincts" to decide not to do your job and not look into Wirecard because you can't imagine something bad can ever happen? Come on! All those regulators should have been fired and tried for corruption and/or accessory to crime.
They can, given basic competence in SW engineering, also verify against GrapheneOS' published release keys. The reason they don't is the same reason Google closed my ticket asking them to include Graphene keys in Play Integrity checks: they don't care.
I think the reasons are very different. VW maybe doesn't care. Google does it because it would undermine their stronghold over the platform. If they would allow GrapheneOS, what would block Samsung or another OEM from also sandboxing Play Services and not preinstalling a bunch of Google apps and requesting the same?
This shows why attestation is in the wrong hands. Whether a particular device is attested should be purely based on the security of the device (which would also exclude a bunch of certified devices that Google will happily attest now), not on maintaining a smartphone duopoly.
As media piracy and game cheating has shown: no matter how hard you try, there will always be ways around it. You should assume that 3rd-party device you have zero control over is already compromised, so why not use the API as the boundary layer, stop pretending you can secure the app, and open it up to 3rd-party access like it already is in practice?
Unless I overlook something, the worst attack vector for a compromised phone is: you could drain the battery by repeatedly turning on the airco.
Though I guess they are rolling out phone-based car keys, which may be the incentive.
And VW didn't single-handedly destroy the diesel market; economics and physics did. Almost every other manufacturer was also fudging the tests results in some way. But more importantly, building a passenger car diesel that meets NOx targets doesn't work; by the time a passenger car diesel meets modern NOx targets honestly, the car contains a ludicrous precious metal loading in the catalyst and is only a few percentage points more efficient in terms of consumption and CO2 emissions than a petrol car and the math doesn't add up. Diesel is just not a practical solution for passenger cars; it never was in most ways, but it took the EU a long time to restrict NOx pollution to a sustainable level and expose the physical issues at hand.
VW knew this but lied to customers and told them they could have both. Dieselgate was their attempt to convince everybody the lie was true.
What VW did was to save money from ThinkBlue systems. Not every manufacturer failed the tests, especially the ones who used exhaust gas treatment did pass, and were more economical than petrol engines. After that, the EU changed emission standards and made them more strict, so VW switched to using dual exhaust treatment. Which made the cars more expensive.
What finally killed diesels was the removal of the tax reduction on diesel fuel. Since it is now taxed the same as petrol, there is no more any advantage that can offset the higher purchasing costs of the cars.
In Dieselgate VW got caught, made the supervisory authorities and politicians look bad, which is why the authorities also weren't inclined to sweep it under the rug completely. They just shielded VW from the financial consequences in Germany (German VW customers got shafted).
Blocking GrapheneOS is the useless "pretending" part of compliance. They don't really want to do security, because that would cost money, so they pick some actions that seem drastic, harsh and don't cost them anything to implement. Later, when there is a security incident, they will point to their huge heap of pretend compliance, whine a bit about state sponsored actors, high criminal intent and other obvious deflecting bullshit. But they will get away with it, because they did the compliance dance, so they are obviously compliant and did nothing wrong. Nobody in authority will look twice als long as they are neither annoyed or made to look bad.
tl;dr: compliance in Germany is performative
From what I can surmise, the German/EU philosophy is more of a closed world approach - accepting that companies will keep control, then government regulates the companies to stop the companies-with-control from causing harm. If you don't like the harm, your recourse-focus is to petition the government to stop it (eg GDPR). Whereas the US philosophy is more open world - once someone "chooses" to patronize a company, then the company is free to do whatever they want. Your recourse-focus is to stop using that company.
They both have shortcomings and glaring loopholes, of course.
Wow, so they must really want to avoid the liability of spying after their users and keeping all that data, and to be extra sure to comply with the GDPR, they must keep only the absolute minimum of data, right?
Wrong: https://www.theregister.com/security/2025/01/06/data-describ...
https://dailysecurityreview.com/security-spotlight/volkswage...
When a company behaves as your enemy, don't invent wild justifications how they're actually not. At least leave it to their PR team.
It's inconceivable that someone would want to use a car outside of it's specified rules.
On one hand you have: Linux at Volkswagen
"Software development without Linux is no longer possible within automotive environment. Therefore Volkswagen Group IT created and maintains a Linux distribution for our developers. This short talk will highlight our starting goal to integrate into the existing environment, highlight our integration problems and solutions with contributing to upstream. Furthermore we will show where Linux desktop need to improve in future iteration to be a good fitting replacement for other systems."
https://media.ccc.de/v/4486-linux-at-volkswagen
On the other hand you have insecure implementation of telemetry: Wir wissen wo dein Auto steht
"Bewegungsdaten von 800.000 E-Autos sowie Kontaktinformationen zu den Besitzern standen ungeschützt im Netz. Sichtbar war, wer wann zu Hause parkt, beim BND oder vor dem Bordell.
Welche Folgen hat es, wenn VW massenhaft Fahrzeug-, Bewegungs- und Diagnosedaten sammelt und den Schlüssel unter die Fußmatte legt?"
https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-wir-wissen-wo-dein-auto-steht-vo...
Compliance is everything, and SAFe (Scaled Agile) is deployed as a blunt instrument.
Management treats software exactly like hardware production lines—everything is just an "engineering process" that can be optimized on a spreadsheet.
The underlying assumption is that individual engineering talent is just an interchangeable commodity. Once you view developers as replaceable cogs, outsourcing the entire infrastructure to the lowest bidder in India becomes the logical conclusion.
It’s a textbook case of process-over-people driving institutional tech debt.
That's exactly my observation as well. Classic hardware-producing companies have an immense respect on the step of entering mass-production, as whatever issue that slipped through will be multiplied and physically spread across the world.
So they come from the mindset that the dominant mindset is to minimize the SURFACE-area of potential risk. This makes it really hard for them to compete in software-space, because in software the dominant mindset is to just estimate risk.
Neither is wrong, but applied vice-versa is.
- If you treat software like hardware, you end up cutting out everything that could make your product fit more than your decided main use-case.
- If you treat hardware like software, you're placing a bet on behalf of your customer that the product "will be fine", and a (very expensive) bet that this product won't create an aftermath which may destroy your entire company.
Companies which can't manage the distinction here end up putting hardware in the hands of customers they should have built differently and then spend all their resources on software updates just to somehow keep the core function working.
Pretty much all software products typically talked about on HN are laughable at that scale, they have crashes or weird bugs way more often than the six sigma norm of 99.9999% reliability.
For example, I don’t think it’s even possible nowadays to buy a new iPad and use it with default apps and settings for any significant duration continuously. It’s well under 1 million minutes of uptime before failure and a hard restart is needed.
So anything more complex than the simplest possible use case of an iPad is even more of a joke under hardware norms.
No one said that it shouldn't.
What I wrote is, that the approach of minimizing any SURFACE of risk in software creates the (subjectively good and solid) software of previous car-generations (in Volkswagen terms: MIB2 ~ a bit downhill already in MIB3): A solid, predictable and closed product fulfilling its core use-case.
But it DOESN'T create a user experience with those "fun" niche features, competitive remote-access Smartphone features, exposed API's, sudden new features during lifecycle, funny "ludicrous modes" etc.
And today's customers are demanding those features, it's now a hygiene factor for a premium experience on Smartphones as well as on cars.
A Tesla is not considered a "Premium" car because of its premium hardware or manufacturing quality. They disrupted the car-industry by being the first to apply a software-dev mindset to it, and the consumer perceives this as premium.
https://www.go-parts.com/garage/brake-pedal-tesla-cybertruck...
https://www.tparts.com/blogs/tesla-latest-news/tesla-issues-...
It's bad quality hardware hiding behind an cleaner engine and some software features.
It is EXACTLY the product of a hardware company which keeps treating hardware-production like it's software, as described above.
> When the cars were operating under controlled laboratory conditions - which typically involve putting them on a stationary test rig - the device appears to have put the vehicle into a sort of safety mode in which the engine ran below normal power and performance. Once on the road, the engines switched out of this test mode.
>
> The result? The engines emitted nitrogen oxide pollutants up to 40 times above what is allowed in the US.
There's only one reason why they're doing this: it benefits them in some way.
You know how some religious groups will string a rope between two houses, count it as a roof as long as they're within a certain horizontal distance of it, so they can follow the rope on occasions when the religion says they have to stay inside, and they think God enjoys them finding these loopholes?
Germany is like that, but with lawsuits. If anyone with money finds a technicality to sue you on, they will. So you have to be extremely liability averse if you want to be successful in business. Also, liability is almost always unlimited. You can be bankrupted by a single bad lawsuit.
But "unlimited liabilities" gives entirely the wrong impression. German courts do not award punitive damages, and fees are generally capped below that amount in dispute.
a.) a global company in the car-industry being cautious of exposing ANY risk-surface in a product because every issue making it to the field doesn't just bear the risk of very expensive recalls/fines but may also put people's ACTUAL lives in danger, to
b.) the country Germany and its whole society
> If anyone with money finds a technicality to sue you on, they will.
In the car-industry you don't need anyone with money to sue you. If you ship a car which is found to endanger participants of traffic, your company may not recover from the aftermath for years...
And I don't think the liability is the primary problem, they have a problem with freedom and fear that they lose some mechanism for monetisation. This is why you get subscriptions for heating your arse.
Unfortunately, due to the regulations that have blown up in the EU in the last decade, they are right.
The company's have done their thing to ensure that the average guy wouldn't even try escaping their lock-in. So chances are becoming smaller and smaller to hope for a critical mass of users to complain.
Vendor lock-in to Play services is ridiculous.
A car is a big purchase, and ideally not something I discard after a few years. I'd like it to not treat me like a second-class citizen and renter who can't make decisions over how to extend the life of my purchase.
specially because no car really supports grapheneos, but it can be used in any car supporting regular android provided google play is installed which ensures google's certification and validation is being preserved. if i get this right bmw is actively blocking this, which would be just a dick move.
Zeekr is getting up there too, but Tesla is going to be leader for ages - most car availability, easiest to service, most hackable software, best in class privacy, tons of third party options.
Beyond the politics involving Tesla, I just do not like the car. I had a Test ride with a Model Y and it just was not a good experience. I hate the touchscreen centered everything, etc. Beyond that, I just want a compact vehicle, which Tesla simply does not offer.
Given Tesla‘s features like the Live camera access and their allegations of employees sharing pictures recorded with the interior cameras of the car, I have as little trust in Teslas privacy promises as with any other manufacturer. They‘re also very expensive in insurance
I'm dealing with my parents Kona EV right now and I can't help but cringe how out dated it feels. Three buttons just to start the car and I need to lock it myself. FFS. And that's on top of myriad of reliability issues.
I get it, Tesla has a bad omen for some who mingle deep in far left. But from technical standpoint it is incredibly well executed. Its touchscreen is second to none. Climate is easier to use than hardware buttons on many cars. It can be intimidating at first, simply because people assume you'll be fiddling with it all the time, but it's simply not the case.
That doesn’t sound like you get it at all.
However, VW just seem to make gaff after gaff. Collecting information they shouldn't, exposing information they shouldn't have to hackers via lax security practices.
How many rakes can a company step on?
Now, they're blocking GapheneOS? They've got two hopes of selling me another 'Dub.
(Bob and No).
All of em.
Nobody wanted the crazy touch dashboards, data collection, emissions nonsense, etc.
Just make the damn car you’ve always made. Be reliable.
If you don’t want/need a new car, the used car market in Germany is pretty active with EQAs and EQBs.
Former colleague had an EQB and I nearly hit another car on the Autobahn because cruise control was not breaking when I got closer. That was really unexpected as that was a standard feature in my Hyundai...
Not quite an SUV, but maybe fits the same use case?
I checked it out. It seems like the 100th indistinguishable car design in our sea of nearly identical cars.
This to say that the "est" part of ugliest confuses me a little.
Peugeot is reasonable and works. Charging could be faster and WLTP longer, and once I had the screens restart while on the motorway which thankfully did not affect driving but was pretty terrifying. All that to say - go ahead and buy European. You'll have some issues but for me all better than to get a china car with who knows what data exfiltration and hidden issues, or a Tesla that will lock you in when the car burns. EU companies are too boring to spy and too risk averse to have tesla-like issues..
So understanding why they drop it is IMHO easy. Understanding why they use only attestation based API despite and forcing their third party ecosystem out is stupid. Companies do not understand open communities.
I have test driven the Kia EV4 and EV3, but I am not a huge fan. I do not enjoy the look of the EV3 and while the EV4 was a nice drive, I kept bumping my leg against the direction selector (which is below the handle for the wipers; But this is a huge nitpick since I am fairly tall, so not really an issue for 99% of drivers).
The main issue with Kia across the board is that their are so darn expensive for insurance. At my current provider, the EV4s insurance would have been 500 EUR more expensive than an roughly equally priced Cupra Born.
Not a huge SUV fan, but the Skoda Elroq and Skoda Enyaq were very nice vehicles as well
It's an easy market to win at this point. The bar has been lowered so much. Already have a nice car? Just don't display utter disdain for your user's privacy and you get our $$.
You should definitely reevaluate how you constructed your list. VW has a history of being scummy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal) and their ICE cars are notorious for being unreliable compared to the Japanese car-makers. To be fair, EVs do change the equation a bit, but given their scandal plagued past, there's no way I would put them at the top of any list.
I always read this online, but my personal experience in EU doesn't match that at all in quite a sample of people and cars over the last ~15 years. At least not for older cards. The reliability after 100k km seems to be somewhat similar.
The repairability of VW-group stuff in 3rd party services is soo much better and cheaper. The WV-group is huge and many models across the brands share same parts and full engines. There exist non-OEM alternatives and people know how to fix those cars.
I have never bought new car. But driving anything but VW got expensive fast.
Toyota cars can have bespoke parts even between different months of the same year for the same model. Continuous improvement isn't really that cool for cars.
Outside Western Europe, VW is priced like a premium upmarket brand (not quite luxury). Maintenance and general upkeep for a VW are easily two to three times the cost of an equivalent Japanese car.
Which wouldn't be an issue if the cars were actually built to their price point. But the VW cars we get here are shittier versions built in nasty factories. They break down if you look at them wrong. The build quality is nonexistent. They are absolutely an awful deal, no matter how you look at them. You also have to personally import parts from wherever they're available, because otherwise only the dealerships have parts and they are absurdly overpriced.
Also, European brands are afraid of exporting EVs. If you want an EV, you buy a Chinese car. There is no other option. It is as simple as that.
Putting these factors aside: they are usually cheaper than their peers in insurance and they have dealerships absolutely everywhere. I've had multiple Skoda and VW EV rentals and the experience has been nothing but pleasant. Hence my priorities.
That is why so many rich fly private jets to environment conferences. People put Greenpeace and similar bumper stickers on their SUVs that never go off road and rarely have more than one person inside. They care about the environment, but only when it doesn't impact anything else in their life.
Emissions scale with performance, and inversely of fuel efficiency. So the environment may not be the most important point, but I'm pretty sure fuel efficiency is high on the list when you're picking a compact or long-range car that is supposed to be fuel efficient.
Also, by advertising as compliant to green specs something that wasn't, means people may have been swayed to purchase irregular cars despite them not being really green, only due to the fact that they may have received rebates and contributions for the purchase, regardless of whether "being greener" ranked high on their decision metrics.
I was lied to. Had I known that was the case there is a good chance I would have gone with a different car.
My car was recalled and reprogrammed and it no longer had the torque it had at first.
Of course now it’s clear that most if not all manufacturers were doing the same trick, they just weren’t caught at it.
It wasn't "more CO2" grade, it was "more NOx" grade. This in urban settings will actually kill more people with respiratory problems.
VW's "clever hack" probably, statistically, killed people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defeat_device
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/24/uk-franc...
Of course the governments probably lobbied for this stuff because it improves their car industry tax profits/employment numbers.
Make sure that dealers know why you changed your mind.
"Some nerd couldn't use their nerd phone."
What incentive does a dealer have to know or care about this?
I wish that Volkswagen would care about this, but I suspect they have little incentive to do so.
Assuming 25% (might be overinflated) of GrapheneOS are European, that’s 10000 European GrapheneOS users who would buy a Volkswagen car (assuming an unbiased distribution of GrapheneOS users, which is probably not the case though).
I don’t think Volkswagen is in a strong position to say they don’t care about 10000 sales in Europe only.
My buzz loves trying to jerk the steering wheel when it can't figure out how the lanes work.
No clue how much vehicle generations affect this performance tho. Since they were rentals, all the vehicles were pretty new
You are driving the biggest trojan horse of spyware ever created. You voluntarily drive around with that thing spying on you AND me. I hate parking at a parking lot now because every car and its 300 cameras are spying on me, putting my face, car and appearance in a database used to track everyone around you.
I genuinely don't know how people like you sleep at night knowing you're raping everyone around you by enabling mass privacy violations. Grow a spine.
VW is for people that can't afford a BMW or Audi.
BMW/Audi is for people who can't afford a Porsche
Porsche is for people that can't afford a Ferrari.
Once you understand that ladder, just stay off of it, and its all good.
An analogy is trying to make users wear certain clothes when they use your product, and then asking why it doesn't fly.
I got an offer from a dealer three weeks ago and was going to order the car, then the API for the community integration got turned off. I decided to hold back and see what comes from it. Now this, which ultimately - since I am a GrapheneOS user - makes me completely cancel my plans.
I really do not understand VWs thinking here. It would cost them little to nothing to continue not blocking the the inofficial API and not block GrapheneOS (or other non Play Protect androids) users. It would have no adverse effects on the average Joe, but it would gain a lot of support and enthusiasm from heavy users, differentiating from other brands. Not to mention the fact that it is the USERS data in the first place