Automotive electronics

The right-to-repair movement has suffered a setback in Massachusetts this week. The Biden administration told car manufacturers not to comply with a state law that would allow independent auto shops and car owners the ability to fix their own vehicles.Cops Pull Over Self-Driving CarVice first reported that the major concern the Biden administration’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has with the law, which is colloquially titled the Data Access Law, is hacking. To express these concerns, Kerry Kolodziej,…

Prathab D, MD, HARMAN IndiaChennai: HARMAN, an automotive electronics technology company and subsidiary of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. focused on designing consumer experiences at automotive grade, has opened a new Automotive Engineering Centre in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. The new Chennai centre, which will be fully functional by the second quarter of this year, will support HARMAN to tap into Chennai’s rich talent pool of automotive engineers and researchers and contribute…

While many electric cars offer advanced driver assistance tech these days, most of those boil down to a few different technologies working together — like lane-keeping and adaptive cruise control. Generally, they work quite well. Together, they can essentially allow a car to drive itself on the highway under the right conditions. But companies are also working on the next generation of self-driving cars, and there’s been no company more public about this than Tesla, which offers its Full Self-Driving tech. But while…

Photo: Spencer Platt (Getty Images)This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.In 2013, long before there was a national campaign pressuring Big Tech to make it easier for people to fix their smartphones, Massachusetts passed a law explicitly giving consumers the right to repair their cars. Now, that right is under threat. A pending federal lawsuit could decide its fate — and in so doing, transform the auto repair landscape at a time when cars increasingly resemble giant…

Photo: Sam CurryHow do you hack a car? Through its infotainment system, apparently. Newly revealed research shows that a number of major car brands, including Honda, Nissan, Infiniti, and Acura, were affectedby a previously undisclosed security bug that would have allowed a savvy hacker to hijack vehicles and steal user data. According to researchers, the bug was in the car’s Sirius XM telematics infrastructure and would have allowed a hacker to remotely locate a vehicle, unlock and start it, flash the lights, honk the…