You do not own your car anymore says the manufacturers

[1ntCobra]

Is "Wired" kind of like those tabloid newspapers that I see near the cash registers in the grocery stores? Has the author of the article ever tried camping on the sidewalk near Wallstreet? The author seems to be twisting his ideas into some way of getting people who do not understand this into a frenzy.

The point of this is the copyright of the software in the vehicle's computer. You have a licence to run that software and if you try to reverse engineer the software and modify it, you are in violation of the software licence. How anyone but an idiot conclude that means you no longer own your vehicle is beyond me.

And how many farmers do you know who can reverse engineer the code in their tractor's computer to modify it? Does the author of the article have a clue what machine code is if you try to reverse engineer the software? It is not the much easier to understand high level language that the software was written in.

If I was so inclined to try to modify the software in my car that controls my antilock brakes or how my hybrid battery charges and my car no longer stops or my hybrid battery dies in a month, do you think the manufacturer should be responsible for my defective brakes and dead multi thousand dollar battery? I would think tweaking some instruction in the machine code would make it very likely I would screw up something.