Moj.io: Connect your car to the world around you

I don't understand why it was designed to fit nicely in your hand, and why it was made with bright colors.

#1. This thing will be under your steering wheel 100% of the time, so being able to hold it ergonomically doesn't make a lick of sense.

#2. If one of your advertised functionalities is for recovery after theft, the last thing you want is for the thief to be able to spot the dongle and remove it. If I bought one, the first thing I would do is obscure it with hockey tape, but I would be concerned that the wireless capabilities would be hindered.

Progressive Insurance did :|

I nearly threw my remote at the television when I first saw that they were trying to get people to plug their insurance company into the computer of their car.

OBD-II, as I understand it, is a multimaster bus protocol, which means any master can send commands. That said, the commands that are exposed to the under-dash interface are restricted to interrogation. The emissions check people can tell how well your O2 sensors are performing but they can't modify the ignition or timing profile, for example.

Modern vehicles report OBD-II signals over Controller Area Network, which is used to link most the controllers in your vehicle. All cars after 2008 in the states use CAN for OBD-II.

Most manufacturers have the OBD-II CAN bus connected to the engine controller for diagnostic purposes. If you can gain control of the CAN bus, you can do some real damage to the car. Furthermore, the hardware must write to the bus to get OBD-II data (it's a request/response system), so it's not a read only device.

Most of the neat things that this device can accomplish could also be done with an OBD-II to Bluetooth interface, which can be had for ~$20 off EBay.

You don't get remote access to the bus, but it's much cheaper. Not sure how they plan to implement some of the non-OBD-II features (remote unlock is a major one) for all vehicles, since there's no standard. But it'll be interesting to see where this goes.