What do exploding cellphones presage for self-driving cars?

We’ve learned that Samsung’s cell phones can explode. Mistakes do happen. Still, we can take the batteries out of the phones. Our phones do not have the power to walk away from us. Self-driving may be another story.

Problems in cars are not new. Toyota had a major scandal with brakes that malfunctioned. Teslas have blown up. Still, humans can find workarounds or avoid driving altogether.

Computers get hacked. Machines can get taken over, but we still typically have an on-off button. Distributed networks of machines have challenged that. Botnets and bitcoin-like networks span still such systems have not killed.

Self-driving cars present new challenges for flaws in their software. What if a bug was triggered on a particular date, which made all self-driving cars go haywire. Would humans have any way to regain control? Driving on the road necessitates a power that can kill and cause mass damage. If a whole highway of cars were hijacked the results could similarly be damaging. However, this might be possible with a hack within only one self-driving car’s software.

We already face risks with internet-connected cars. Someone could potentially take over the software within these machines. Still, we have a human nearby, who could hopefully counteract such measures.

Self-driving cars need to develop similar countermeasures to prevent being maliciously taken over. Could a separate fail-safe system shutdown the car if sabotage or malfunctions were detected? Would it be possible to vary the software between cars, so there is no one vulnerability for all cars? We must up the safeguards as technology gets more advanced.