First, from 2013 - Michael Hastings:
The lunch never happened. At 4:20 a.m. on Tuesday, June 18, Hastings’s silver Mercedes C250 coupe, speeding south on Highland Avenue, crossed Melrose, jumped the median, hit a palm tree, and exploded. The charred body of the driver was identified by the Los Angeles coroner as John Doe 117 until fingerprints confirmed that the deceased was Michael Hastings.
. . . at the time of his death, Hastings was working on a profile of CIA director John Brennan for Rolling Stone.
Second, more recently - Anne Heche:
Except now we know that Anne Heche, who had vowed to expose an elite Hollywood pedophile ring in the days before her bizarre death, was not high on drugs on the day of the fatal car crash.
According to the results of her autopsy which have been obtained by Page Six, the mainstream media was lying about Heche’s state of mind, attempting to smear and discredit her.
. . . First of all, let’s take a look at the video the played by mainstream outlets on the day of the crash.
The media announced Heche was brain dead, but inconvenient facts started leaking out. First of all, Heche was fighting for her life, attempting to get out of the body bag.
Secondly, Anne Heche was talking to firefighters while she was being rescued. It hardly needs spelling out, but brain dead people don’t talk.
And judging by the way the firefighters were acting, many people don’t believe they were firefighters at all. Pay attention to this video. Anne Heche was covered up completely as if dead. She was carried out by firefighters to one of their vehicles, not by paramedics to an ambulance.
. . . and perhaps many others.
In the case below, it was probably an actual, no-malice glitch -- and no one was hurt or killed.
IDK what we can do to protect ourselves from this sort of thing, short of selling our modern cars and driving pre-computerized junkers, but we should at least keep in mind that remote take-over of vehicles IS something that can be done.
Honda said it has been left baffled by an unbelievable near-miss in Minnesota last month when the in-drive computer of a Minnesota teenager's vehicle took over and accelerated him through streets at speeds of up to 113mph.
Sam Dutcher, 18, said he thought he was 'going to die' during the terrifying episode in West Fargo on September 17, which only ended when heroic deputies let him crash into them.
(more)
Were/are all of these vehicles electric?
Or can they also remotely control gas cars too?
I don't think any of these were electric; all modern cars, gas or electric, have electronic control of accelerator and most now have electronic control to some extent of steering and brakes. And all of that can be hacked through the car's antenna and central computer.
Narg, to answer your question, the only way to help prevent that would be to disable the antenna for the telematics unit or remove the whole thing in order to prevent that from happening.
That's not to say they can't influence the car in other ways but hacking telematics is super easy for hackers.
I've thought about installing a switch that would physically disconnect the antenna from all the electronics in the car. For that matter, I think all cell phones should have such a switch -- not something in software but a physical disconnect from (in this case) the battery.