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.
You realize tesla was already caught remotely disabling a guy’s car because he was modding it?
They can do all of this already. They can set the accelerator to 100% remotely if they want to, would take zero effort and then they can say it was a malfunction.
Now we are all being pin point tracked with our phones and recorded already of course, but the Tesla has GPS they can access and find you at any time too.
To be fair, every car can do this now even if its gas, because of all the bullshit electronics In cars. Its super easy to disable a normal gas car by shutting down the coil packs.
Do you have a link? I only recall some dubious claim of a Cybertruck dude, but there were counterallegations he was just some rapper who wanted cheap publicity. I don’t remember what the conclusion of that incident was.
I am aware that DMCA was specifically designed to stop modders/hackers from benefitting from their property and extorting repair bills by forcing users to go only to tesla dealerships for a lot of work. No right to repair.