I was doing some random ‘writer prompt’ thinking about this today, while thinking about the current/future car industry.

If most of our cars have self drive technology, and they can identify people/pedestrians, then in a state of war, couldn’t the programming be changed to target them instead of miss them?

And for electric cars, couldn’t an enemy state alter the battery management system to cause a runaway thermal battery fire? Imagine every electric car co-ordinated to all catch on fire at the one time. That could make an interesting story.

Just to be clear, I don’t think this would happen, or even know of it’s actually possible.

It just made me think, well, I couldn’t prevent this by buying an Australian car. Which made me sad and miss the old Aussie built cars.