Dear Hyundai,
Please open up your car firmware to everyone.
Thank you and best regards,
Liv
I own a 2022 Hyundai Kona. I love it, most of the time. But there is one gripe with it that gets me annoyed quite often. Most cars today are able to detect when the owner walks away and lock themselves automatically. My car is also able to detect when the owner walks away. It does not lock itself. Instead, it SENDS ME AN EMAIL AND A PHONE NOTIFICATION telling me that I left my car unlocked, at which point I can sign into an app and press a button to lock the car. There is no way to enable auto-lock. It has all the hardware necessary to detect that nobody is sitting in the seats, and that the key has left, and then EMAIL ME about it. For fuck's sake, I could automate this shit and have my server send an API request to lock the car if it receives an email. Please, Hyundai, open up your firmware to the public, I'm sure people would love to add auto-lock.
I will now spend the rest of the post pointing out things that the car has the capability of doing hardware-wise, but not software-wise.
- Let me set a side-mirror position that kicks in when I put the car into reverse
- Let me save my auto-hold and drive mode preferences so I don't need to set them every time I get in the car
- Don't override by regen setting every time I change the drive mode
- Let me change the regen setting when Cruise Control is enabled, such that the setting applies when I exit cruise control
- You adapt my cruise control speed to the speed limit when on highways. Do that on surface streets too.
- When holding the cruise control button to increment the speed set, let it snap to the current speed limit, even if it's a value that is not part of the increment.
- Auto-launch CarPlay
- Auto-apply the parking brake when I shift into park
- Why do I need to press the start car button? Just... start the car when I shift into Drive.
- Let me show my efficiency in mi/kWh with the speedometer in kph
- Literally nobody but me wants this
- Just open source the firmware and let me have at it
- Do not question my poor choices
- Make the power meter actually mean something
- Switch from driver-centric audio to car-centric audio whenever anyone sits in the passenger seat or rear seats
- Why does it work any other way than this
All of this and more could be accomplished with a software update. The car has access to all of this data, but it simply chooses not to use it effectively. Opening up the car's firmware to the public could bring many improvements. I don't even care if you use a weird license barring other manufacturers from using the firmware. Just the ability for hobbyists to do what they want would be so nice.
Anyway, be on the lookout for some Docker container from me that watches for emails from Hyundai and locks my car automatically 🙄, if I ever get around to it.