- A driver in China inadvertently discovered a glitch using their car’s voice commands.
- When asked to turn off the car’s interior lights, the car’s voice assistant shut off the car’s headlights, allegedly resulting in a crash.
- Lynk & Co issued an emergency patch, though other brands tested by owners were found to potentially be affected by similar vulnerabilities.
There are a lot of ways to inadvertently crash a car. Falling asleep, texting, misjudging the capabilities of your driver assistance systems. But a car misunderstanding a voice command and shutting off the headlights isn’t one that most would expect.
That’s allegedly what happened in China, when the driver of a Lynk & Co Z20 reportedly issued a voice command that shut off the car’s headlights while in motion. The driver says that caused him to not see the median, causing a crash, and it was all caught on the car’s dashcam.
Photo by: InsideEVs
The system apparently interpreted the natural-language request to turn off the car’s interior reading lamps as a request to turn off all of the car’s lights—including the car’s headlights. The owner reportedly attempted to re-activate the headlights using voice controls, however, the system responded to the driver that the “operation could not be completed.” Then the car struck a median.
We would expect most automakers to place technical safeguards in place to prevent that from happening from a car’s central controls. Programming isn’t a perfect science, though, and clearly no one foresaw this issue.
Lynk & Co responded to the event quickly. The company’s deputy general manager of sales, Mu Jun, posted to Chinese social media platform Weibo on Thursday that the company had pushed an emergency over-the-air update. This updated reportedly corrects the logic to prevent the headlights from being disabled in inappropriate conditions when using voice commands.
Photo by: Weibo
The kicker is that it’s not only Lynk & Co that’s susceptible to these voice commands. CNEVPost reports that owners of other brands like Zeekr and Deepal tested to see if their vehicle were affected by similar asks of the car’s voice assistant. By using broad commands like “turn off all lights,” the owners found that they too could bypass the built-in safety systems and switch off the lights.
The Lynk & Co Z20 is sold in Europe as the Lynk & Co 02. It’s not clear if any non-China market cars are affected, nor if any brands in the U.S. have similar vulnerabilities.
Traditional vehicle safety design means that critical systems like lighting are heavily interlocked between in-car controls. You don’t want a single ambiguous input to be misinterpreted by AI and accidentally override technical controls meant to safeguard these critical systems. But in the era of smart everything, these small technical glitches are bound to happen.
The good news is that it wasn’t a wide-spread catastrophe and was patched fairly quickly by the automaker. Let it serve as a sharp reminder that when your car also becomes smart, it also inherits smart-device problems.
