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Wait wait wait, are you telling me I can actuate the brakes and gas and turn the steering wheel via the CAN bus? So I can realize my dream of turning my car into an RC car just with a Raspberry Pi and a $4 dongle? That is the best news of the year!

Which cars have these sorts of actuators? How can I see if mine does?



Yup! https://github.com/commaai/openpilot-tools/raw/master/steer....

If your car is in this list:

https://github.com/commaai/openpilot#supported-cars

then it definitely works and you can use these tools to control it https://github.com/commaai/openpilot-tools

If it's not in that list then the rough heuristic is whether or not your car has some sort of existing driver assist features e.g. Adaptive Cruise Control, Lane Centering, Forward Collision Warning, etc. There are some exceptions to that rule (I think Hyundai ships some cars that have full control of steering and gas even if you don't option out the ADAS features) but that's all case by case.

If you join the Comma Discord (https://discord.comma.ai/) there are manufacturer specific channels that can answer any questions you've got.


I love you, this is amazing and I am going to get right on it. Hopefully I won't crash my car in the process.


Remote control is a banned topic for safety reasons


That makes sense, thank you.


Please remind the admins that Discord does not support users that choose to keep their location private by using Tor.

This makes it a nonstarter for a lot of people.


Almost any car with drive by wire and/or modern safety features (lane assist, forward crash avoidance, etc) can be controlled (to an extent) via the CANBUS.

It’s different for (almost) every car, but you’d be amazed how easy and fun cars are to hack on, as long as you keep it off the streets.


It's definitely lots of fun, but I didn't know it was easy, I thought the CAN bus was read-only. I can't wait to discover what my car supports.


If it was read-only... how would you be able to 'clear a check engine light'...?


Actually it's a horrible thing, think of it, a terrorist can buy one of these cars, install rasperrypi with internet access through mobile data, then they can terrorize the whole town by running people over without being caught or killed


Not really, all you need is a few other people in cars to block them in, problem solved. Or, if it's the US, for the police to use some of those ex-military surplus toys they have. That's not getting into remote control being imprecise so good chance the car will just get stuck somewhere.


Why bother doing that when you can just drone-drop grenades into a crowd for much cheaper?


You can easily ban drones but not cars.


Wouldn't it be easier to ban grenades?




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