Control your car from the lounge

Sometimes you just want to sit back in your living room and tell your car what to do. Well one technically minded entrepreneur with time on his hands has made that reality by utilising the Amazon Echo home assistant device.

Tesla likes the idea of connected cars and the ability to hook up the multimedia system of a vehicle like the Model S to the omnipresent internet is of great interest to Elon Musk and his development crew at the progressive electric vehicle manufacturer.

For a lot of us, however, there are fears that in our connected futures bands of hooded hackers lie in wait to take control of our vehicles and send us to our fiery deaths during a pleasant Sunday drive. Just ask current Jeep owners how they felt about this story from July 2015.

Time marches on and no more quickly than in the tech world, where self-described tech-tinkerer Luke Millanta produced a video of his attempt to get a Tesla Model S to respond to voice commands through the Amazon Echo gadget.

Essentially the system uses an unofficial API (Application Programming Interface) integrated into the Tesla operating system and connected via the mobile LTE network embedded in the infotainment system.

Tesla is not afraid to use the connectivity of its vehicles, pushing software updates over the air with ease. Millanta has taken advantage of this to produce a limited set of commands activated by the Alexa Skill software housed in the AWS Lambda cloud service.

The API packets connect to the car to produce a range of results. The video showcases the most obvious such as unlocking or locking the car, honking the horn, opening the charging port or flashing the lights.

Millanta, whose background is in start-up companies such as Acedeemit which offers a digital assessment platform for online course delivery, has an obvious interest in pushing the tech envelope around ground-breaking technology.

But he says this is only the beginning. "It should be noted,” says Millanta “that this can also be used to check the charging status of the Tesla (what percentage the battery is at), to start or stop a charging process, to start the air-conditioning system [to] cool or heat the car before entry, and to track the location / current speed of the vehicle.”

Before you decry this invasion of privacy, and throw your arms in the air, the Model S will only accept these commands via the authorised Tesla owner interface -- the same interface used for those over-the-air software updates. So, as long as that remains relatively secure, so can you.

When asked why he decided to poke around in this area in the first place, Millanta stated: "Well, while I would love for somebody to say 'Hey, that’s cool! How about I pay you a $1 million signing bonus, fly you to San Francisco, give you a Tesla P100D and a six-figure job', I have to admit I didn’t do it for any of that. I did it because I wanted to see if I could.’