Tesla Model 3
This Tesla car may get hacked in Pwn2Own. Pictured: Guests look at a Tesla Model 3 during a ground-breaking ceremony for a Tesla factory in Shanghai on January 7, 2019. - Musk presided over the ground-breaking for a Shanghai factory that will allow the electric-car manufacturer to dodge the China-US tariff crossfire and sell directly to the world's biggest market for 'green' vehicles. Getty Images/AFP/STR

Software hacking competition Pwn2Own has included the Tesla Model 3 sedan among its categories. Once hacked, a winner can take home the car for free.

The official Pwn2Own site details which parts of the Tesla Model 3 contestants should target. Since the Tesla Model 3 is mostly electronic and can be set to autopilot using computer programming, the car developers have taken the opportunity to enter it into the contest to find their car's programming flaws. According to The Verge, Tesla vehicle software chief David Lau said that they are looking forward to seeing whether or not the Tesla car could be hacked by someone.

“We look forward to learning about and rewarding great work in Pwn2Own so that we can continue to improve our products and our approach,” he said, hinting that after the contest, improvements in Tesla’s vehicles can be expected.

Moreover, the free Tesla Model 3 will be rewarded to the first-round winner in hacking the car. So far, the categories in hacking the Tesla sedan are:

  • Modem or Tuner
  • Wi-Fi or Bluetooth
  • Infotainment
  • Gateway, Autopilot or VCSEC
  • Autopilot, Denial of Service
  • Key Fobs or Phone-as-Key
  • Persistence
  • CAN Bus

Generally, the hacking competition wants the contestants to operate the Tesla Model 3 from their own unrelated devices through codes, hacking or any malicious software. Alternatively, the persistence and CAN bus categories focuses on consistently stopping the car from rebooting its software or getting total control of the sedan’s CAN bus, which is the car’s computer system. The exact car model that the hackers can win will be a Tesla Model 3 mid-range, rear-wheel drive vehicle.

In other news, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has announced that they’ll discontinue the lower-end versions of Model S and X. Additionally, Musk also said that they’ll be able to do the SpaceX test launches around February or March.

Currently, the spaceship projects are undergoing tests to optimize which engines and parts would work well for the test flight. For now, we’ll just have to wait and see who’ll win the free Tesla Model 3 car and what other projects Musk will unveil in the coming months.

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