Months after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s personal chauffeur was killed in an unexplained high-speed head-on collision, another driver has suffered the same fate after begging police for help for eight minutes prior to the collision:
Kaushal Gandhi, from Harrow, north London, died instantly when his car hit a stationary 18-tonne lorry on the M40 in Buckhinghamsire in February – leaving the vehicle crushed with the roof peeled back.
The 32-year-old called the emergency services while behind the wheel of his Skoda Octavia and said he could not stop the vehicle from accelerating. A recording of the eight-minute call he made was played at the inquest into his death.
In 2013, Rolling Stone investigative reporter Michael Hastings was killed when his car suddenly accelerated, spun out of control, and inexplicably detonated on impact. Hastings had authored an exposé of U.S. General Stanley McChrystal for Rolling Stone that had caused the general’s resignation.
Previously, tin whiskers had been implicated in sudden unexplained acceleration. In these cases, a naïve analysis of the vehicle black box would indicate driver error as the cause of the crash, even though the accelerator input would actually have been subject to an unintended short circuit, making it appear as if the driver were to blame.
In 2015, researchers demonstrated that a car could be remotely hacked via its liability insurance company’s monitoring dongle to apply and disable brakes while the car was in motion, among other features.
In 2016, automotive cybersecurity researchers presented an array of attacks against a 2014 Jeep Cherokee that added various trojan-horse methods to existing remote control methods to variously hijack a vehicle’s acceleration, braking, and steering components.
