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.

  • ZeroGravitas@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    2·
    7 hours ago

    Tesla does a lot of business overseas. A lot less these days, but there’s still water in that well, which would dry up pretty fast though following such a scenario. I don’t know the numbers, but if they sell more than half their cars on US soil I’d be very surprised.

    Now picture this news leaking out in Europe, like Norway for instance. That would be reason enough for government mandated firmware hacking, and Tesla as a commercial entity would be done.

    Let me ask you this instead. Do you see ICE capable of such a technically sophisticated, precision operation at scale? ICE is a blunt instrument currently being used to punish Democrat states - the fact they’re looking for illegals in Illlinois and Minneapolis when Texas and Florida have at least 10x more is what’s hilarious for me. And honestly, if I drove a Tesla in the US today, I’d be more worried about being shot in the head by ICE through the side window than being kidnapped by my car.

    Like I said previously, plenty of reason to dislike both Tesla and ICE, no need to add hypothetical Black Mirror scenarios to the mix.