Mercedes locks faster acceleration behind a yearly $1,200 subscription - The Verge

[WasserGKuehlt]

Rigorous in terms of process yes. That doesn't always translate into a more secure design...

Which car manufacturer(s) required this centralized authentication of diagnostics tools for each use (to satisfy the challenge from a car)?

Well yea, but you'd assume a modicum of competence. Having said that, there are horror stories at the pure-software places (cloud providers) so..

This was MB, and I don't know the name of the authorization company. My understanding at the time was that auto manufacturers delegate authorization to in-market companies, and consolidation does happen - so it's not inconceivable to have one operator servicing multiple manufacturers.

The smaller ones do this in house (ie the Ferrari example from earlier).

I would imagine nowadays it's a bit more servicey/cloud-based. I had an incident at work not too long ago, where an outage meant customer cars had lost some of their functionality. It's... real.

 

[whitex]

This was MB, and I don't know the name of the authorization company. My understanding at the time was that auto manufacturers delegate authorization to in-market companies, and consolidation does happen - so it's not inconceivable to have one operator servicing multiple manufacturers.

Any chance you can get me some more details on this? I know engineers at MB working on update and OTA systems and they told me they have specific product requirements to not require real-time internet connection to reflash/diagnose vehicles, since they have dealers throughout the world who don't have reliable internet.