In the last few years I have done a lot of automotive security research, one of my findings about cars from BMW, which was the result of working on contract for the ADAC, was published in February 2015: the original German version and the translated English version.
A few days ago Tencent Keen Security Lab published their findings about BMW cars in this paper.
While in general I find it great that there is more public research in the area of automotive security, I really don't like it if previous work isn't respected. The report of Tencent Keen Security Lab does not contain any reference to previous work besides their own. I would at least have expected references to previous QNX research (QNX is the OS used in the BMW infotainment ECU) and my work when it comes to the TCB (Telematic Communication Box, the name of the BMW telematic ECU). For example regarding the TCB, the description of the communication protocol with the backend and how encrypted SMS is used, with identical encryption keys in all cars, was already contained in my report. To find out why there are no references to others work I contacted them, but I didn't receive any reply.
Could it be that they really aren't aware of previous work? If you start researching the BMW telematic ECU, you would very soon become aware of NGTP (Next Generation Telematics Protocol), the protocol used to communicate with the BMW backend. Searching on Google for "TCB" and "NGTP" will give you the link to the German article on the first place. OK, it's just the German article and you would have to open it to find the link to the English translation, which requires an additional step.
What if they don't use Google but Baidu? Searching for "TCB" and "NGTP" on Baidu gave this link on the fourth place. I can't read the page, but this seems to be the Chinese translation of the article from Heise, even the text in the diagrams is translated. Interestingly when I tried to reproduce my search from last week on Baidu today, this page no longer appears in the search results, although the page itself still exists.
So for me its looks like this: Tencent Keen Security Lab either simply doesn't give reference to previous work and follows the old Chinese tradition of "Clone and Copy" or they don't have any clue about Information Gathering, which is one the first steps when starting to research a target. In my opinion neither of the two possibilities is what you really want.