Is BMW ready for 5G and fighting Hackers?

In the last years, connectivity is an important aspect that automakers have been concerned with. Instead of focusing on more traditional aspects of cars which they have mostly mastered, they’re exploring and getting deeper in research and development of connectivity, autonomy and technology for the benefit of the consumers. The digital world will soon have 5G connection and there are security issues like hackers that they need to think about ahead of time.

With advanced technology, it is not impossible for hackers to remotely hack into a car and completely take control over it. This is a reality of the current times. There were even cases when infotainment systems have been hacked while people are actually driving the car and this is pretty scary.

BMW is not just sitting and waiting for these bad things to happen. In fact, BMW has done extensive work to create systems that are extremely difficult to breach. They have even hired hackers to try and breach their systems, just to be sure.

In an interview with Automotive News Europe, Christoph Grote, BMW’s Senior Vice President of Electronics,said that theft prevention and safety are not new concepts. “We have been exposed to a similar threat in the form of car theft for a long time. In that sense we have a technical history of preventing car theft and preventing people from starting our cars without a key,” he says. Remote hacking roughly a new concept and it is not something that can be ignored by BMW. Grote says, “the threat of manipulating the car has definitely increased. We’ve made efforts for quite a while to test if someone can penetrate our cars. We’ve hired talent not just to build systems that are as resilient as possible to hacking, but also people who are good at it in order to test ourselves.”

Grote feels that customers shouldn’t be worried “With respect to BMW, I am very positive that we have the right competencies within the company to defeat them.” However, he does admit that preventing hacker is something that will never stop and will need constant work. “But the truth of hacking is that you are never done. It’s not a situation where we can ever say we know we are safe forever. The first big wave for connected cars started in the mid-1990s but just before it was about to happen a lot of people got nervous and withdrew.” Claiming that BMW was one of the first and only car companies to start working on connectivity. “There were a few automakers that pulled it off, basically three including BMW, and we stuck with it and gradually ramped up our penetration to what is now about 90 percent of our cars being connected. We’ve been building functionality on the infotainment and safety sides since.”

BMW will also start working with new 5G connected technology. Grote claims that 5G connectivity will be used for more serious things in the future, as opposed to just entertainment services. ”For example, automated driving will require the car to be entirely safe even without a mobile connection. On the other hand, a lot of the services that 5G can enable will help make that a really good product. Automated cars will move based on maps and sensors, relating what they see to what’s in the map. Updating that map is going to be something done through mobile connections.”