Gentlemen, start your engines – with your phone!

This will cause problems.

In the UK it's illegal for a car to be on a road with the engine running when you're not in the car.

At least when prats do this currently you can remove their keys and drop them down the nearest drain. (I throw them under the seat, if I'm feeling kind.)

UK Highway Code 123 : "You MUST NOT leave a parked vehicle unattended with the engine running"

Solution looking for a problem

Why?!! Unless you can instruct the car to come and collect you, what purpose does this serve?

The obvious drawback is if you are mugged and your phone is stolen. Jonny Deviant has a quick look and finds the car app installed. He uses it to locate your car, unlock it and drive off. You're left nursing your injuries, unable to contact the emergency services or drive yourself to the nearest A&E/police station.

Twitter integration

So I could constantly tweet my location, direction and speed to all and sundry - more web 2.0 nonsense for all.

This is for US.....

where we already had remote start for many years :) Now I may start the car to warm up in winter from my desk, 15 minutes before quitting time, instead of having to walk to the window first, due to the limited range of my remote, and I may start it reliably regardless of which corner of the lot I park.

Based on the comments left by others, it looks like you guys have to wait in your cars in winter for the car to warm up instead of using a remote starter?! This would be cruel and unusual on this side of the pond :) Re blowing up the horn, I can see why it would be very useful in a normal mall setting here in US - a normal remote does not even begin to have the range needed for a US mall parking lot.

Solution to *some* problems, cause of some more

Being able to start your car remotely and let it warm up would be a useful feature on cold mornings, especially if you're somewhere that *really* gets cold.

However it creates a problem for safety. What happens if the car's been left in gear, for instance? This isn't something that can easily be retrofitted to an engine management system, because ultimately a lot of engine management system failure modes end up with the driver having to do something, even if it's only steering the car to the side of the road when the engine cuts out. If there's no driver behind the wheel, that's a big change to your safety case.

Red Bren, you seem to be missing a clue there. If you've been mugged, they'll have your car keys, and if the car's visible then pressing the lock button will flash the lights. So there's no obvious drawback there.

Got it

Already have this. Just stuck a Mini-ITX box in my clapped out Ford Mondeo and did the same. It's amazing what you can do with a fanless VIA processor and a couple of cables and £10 gadgets.

Stick a £10 serial GPS in and you have a tracking system to see how fast the kids have been going (not that I have any that age yet). I used a bluetooth one and a cheap bluetooth dongle and hey presto! Instant car-wide bluetooth functionality.

Stick a £10 audio cable round the car and plug it into any modern radio that takes "aux" input and you have an entertainment device of unlimited capacity.

Stick a £10 3G dongle and you can live-track the GPS, or enable automatic vehicle tracking (if it gets nicked), or have it text you if it moves outside a certain area, or report in every know and again with websites.

Stick a £10 Wifi dongle on it and your passengers get the full Internet while you drive (I DO NOT use this thing myself while driving - I don't even have a satnav in eye-shot, because I'm so vehement about such things).

Stick a £10 OBD-II cable on it and you have automatic monitoring and recording of the engine, queriable remotely (which, along with GPS tracks, is basically a complete accident-black-box system). My car is too old to do everything OBD but I can still pull enough useful info to convince my (mechanic) father to check his own personal car for useful info with an OBD device (not just "engine fault" but everything from load percentage to road speed to engine temperatures to fuel gauges etc.).

Stick a £10 USB interface board on it (and some glue electronics / relays) and you can do anything from controlling the lights, activating the ignition, winding down the windows or anything else you feel like doing - lovely 12v-DC-only systems that just work.

And power? I can run it for 24 hours off something no bigger than a house alarm battery which can charge whenever you drive "for free", or you can set the PSU to time itself off however-many minutes after the ignition goes off and run it off your main battery. I think mine did 10W last I checked, which is about the same as an indicator bulb or interior light.

Wake on serial etc. mean a tiny timer circuit can be used to switch the thing back on again if the car alarm goes off, you activate it via remote phone, etc.

Wouldn't *TOUCH* a car with this stuff built-in though. They always go too mad and end up making it the ONLY way to open the car and such nonsense.

Gosh, that's clever.....

.....oh, no it isn't.

I remember a colleague telling me about the car he had in the USA which allowed him to "blip" it through the office window 500yds away to start the engine, so it was all toasty warm when he went out to it.

That was all of a decade ago.

As for the other functions, I can't quite see how knowing how much fuel is in it before you get to it (and can actually do something about it) is of any use at all, unless you're the sort of complete dickhead who neglects to look at the fuel gauge when setting off somewhere. Then again you'd need a very special sort of dickhead, who would remember to fire up and look at their iPhone app's fuel gauge while also forgetting to look at the car's own one, to make it worthwhile.

As for the remaining oil life, that puzzled me for a bit. Then I remembered that one of the notable things that seperates Yank automotive forums from those elsewhere is this strange obsession with oil. They agonise about grades, additives, lifespan-for-this-type-of-usage and such endlessly, while the rest of us top it up once in a while and change it when the service interval comes around, using whatever is specified in the handbook.

One thing that would appear to be missing is the ability to specify which brand of tyre you have on and then have it come up with a recommended tyre rotation strategy according to some voodoo calculation (another weird automotive obsession unique to the Septics).

Computers in cars

Sadly, the evidence suggests that car manufacturers have ignored most of the lessons learned from 20 years of general-purpose computing. I used to think the problem was limited to clunky UIs with deep menu structures, but this is much more alarming.

Experience shows that almost any system that has network connections will be penetrated. It seems that the security systems in on-board computers leave a lot to be desired. A few months ago there was a Reg article linking to a fascinating paper about how easy they are to hack. The researchers were able to control the engine, brakes and lights in a moving car. The only security feature was that you needed physical access to the vehicle to install a radio receiver - it looks like that safeguard has just been removed.

My own car has a built-in "phone" that's used for emergency calls, web browsing and a rather pointless application that lets me send locations from Google Maps to the car. I don't think anyone hates me enough to use it to crash my car remotely, but I wonder how vulnerable to theft such a car is.

Part of the problem is that it's almost impossible to find out anything about the system running in a car. One has to suspect that this may be an attempt at security through obscurity.

Already been done

Take a look-see here:

-- http://www.leftlanenews.com/gone-in-20-minutes-using-laptops-to-steal-cars.html

Apparently, David Beckham had a couple BMW X5s nicked in this manner...

wouldn't it be more useful

to be able to turn the bloody thing off if it got twocked?

Actually, if it did get nicked, I'd like to be able to take over the steering and lock the doors.

'Sit back in your seat, sonny, and enjoy the ride. It might be your last. Did you know this car can drive underwater. Let's find a river....

Should be popular with Mafia and Terrorists, maybe the alternate IRA

This will be very handy for remote starting cars to see if US operatives have placed bombs on board.

Al Quaida and the IRA subset could rewire horn circuit to TRIGGER bombs/UIDS.

Real smart GM.