I’ve been joking for years that I refuse to drive a car that has a computer in it, because I’m a software engineer and am therefore unable to trust any system other software engineers have ever touched.

Except I’m not entirely joking. I really like my old-fashioned, non-upgradeable, non-networked, CAN-bus-free classic Range Rover, and part of the reason I am happy to keep on paying its hefty repair and maintenance bills is that I don’t have to worry that its 20-year-old electrical systems are vulnerable to control by malicious external agents like hackers or federal agents:

The Jeep’s strange behavior wasn’t entirely unexpected. I’d come to St. Louis to be Miller and Valasek’s digital crash-test dummy, a willing subject on whom they could test the car-hacking research they’d been doing over the past year. The result of their work was a hacking technique—what the security industry calls a zero-day exploit—that can target Jeep Cherokees and give the attacker wireless control, via the Internet, to any of thousands of vehicles. Their code is an automaker’s nightmare: software that lets hackers send commands through the Jeep’s entertainment system to its dashboard functions, steering, brakes, and transmission, all from a laptop that may be across the country.

Motorcycles are even more trustworthy; most of them don’t contain so much as a single microcontroller.