Scenario: Undocumented immigrant family in Minneapolis get in their Tesla car to go to work, school or shopping. The doors lock and are disabled via software OTA. Because they are not mechanical, the family can’t open the doors. They try to roll down a window, but that too is software controlled. The buttons do nothing. They are trapped.
The car then disables the steering colums via OTA software so the wheel goes limp. It is a drive by wire steering with no mechanical, rack and pinion physical link for the driver to control. Even the brakes are fully drive by wire so the driver can’t stop the car.
The cars autodrive engages and sends the trapped family to an ICE detention facility. In a panic the driver tries to turn off the car and finds that button is software controlled as well. The family find they are disconnected from their own car and are left with the choice of smashing a window and jumping out of a moving car, or to be sent to a processing facility for their concentration camp.
Is there any design feature stopping this from from hapening today?
Edit: In hindsight, it seems like this was the obvious design goal all along. The user has been completely disconnected from control of anything and it is to my understanding 100% drive by wire.
Edit 2: Another possibility is simple deactivation so people can’t drive out of an area. Imagine ICE sweep an area and deactivate all software controlled cars.
Maybe Trump wants to punish a region showing defiance and disable cars, or cause them to drive to pickup locations.
Edit 3: I’m also reminded of the internal cameras that can use facial recognition to identify undesirables and can either be remotely disabled and report undesirables for ICE pickup, or self-drive as stated earlier. It seems everything about this car is designed for dual use. Weaponizing a consumer good under the guise of features and convenience.
I don’t know enough about Tesla models to reply, that’s just a fact I filed away at some point under strange design decisions - you must agree that having a door latch that damages your car window on use is strange.
But I feel like you’re looking at this from a purely US-centric view (I’m not US based myself, just to be clear). Tesla can’t afford not to sell overseas, so it can’t afford the loss of reputation. Besides, there’s potential for abuse in all cars with a central computer and a connection to the Internet these days: lock doors & broadcast location is a trivial feature to implement. It just doesn’t make sense practically for ICE to pursue this,at least in my opinion.
All true. But the car does seem to be designed for weaponization. You talk about the hit to reputation, but what hit would they take? An OTA assasination is just an everyday car accident. Plausible deniability. A kidnapped family won’t tell the press anything. Undesirables were disappeared by ICE. There is no one to tell the story, thus no story to tell.