Pretty cool tho that they showed this now rather than later on when everyone is being chauffeured about by hackers into walls.

Why are there cars that can be controlled via remote computers anyway? I mean, computers in cars are fine but why are they connected to the speed?

Imo, everything that has to do with the actual controlling of the car (steering, speed, brakes, gearing, anything I'm missing?) should be in a closed system, ie. not connected to the internet or anything connected to the internet. Actually, not connected to anything that can receive signals of any kind.

agree with you here, they shouldn't connect directly internet and car mechanic control to the car, at least they should make inderectly connected but not direct connection. 

An even more detailed article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/07/22/car-hacking-just-got-real-hackers-disable-suv-on-busy-highway/

There is another point to be made here tho, when you program a car with an "autopilot" system you are going to be asking a computer programmer to play God a bit, if the car is heading towards a no-win scenario where there is a little girl going to hit the left side of the car or a dog walked out at the right side at the same time.... it's pretty dark to consider that the car is going to have to be programmed in such a situation to steer into the dog than to risk hitting the human. We're basically starting to program machines with a set of priorities of the order in which life can be ended down to the choice of "continue driving on road into school bus full of kids"/"vere off the road into a wall to avoid bus but potentially killing the passengers in the car" Basically putting together a pros cons list for life into a PC in the car... awful idea.

Even moreso if a hacker can tap into it and potential make a car into a killing machine if you can change around these settings. If it's possible to alter basic things like speed and heat it would only be a matter of time before you can change the very code the car is running from.

You can keep your self driving cars, I like driving.

And why does this vehicle have wireless access to it's control systems?

could be for something as innocent as updating maps in the gps system which need to be kept up to date so that new roads or old roads can be added/removed, what they said in the video is they used their exploit to get into the system then move laterally around to see what systems are linked together to send them commands, just down to shoddy programming basically.

Or cutting corners and cost on hardware. Ideally the control systems should have no direct link to the outside apart from the obd port.

That could be tricky if the control systems use the gps map data.

glad I have an older model car at the moment thennnn