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.
The cars autodrive engages and sends the trapped family to an ICE detention facility.
Is there any design feature stopping this from from hapening today?
A version of your scenario ran on Black Mirror, if I’m not mistaken.
As for why this won’t happen, or at least not yet:
Actually, if a Tesla could be proven do that, it would be done as a car company. Who in their right mind would buy something like that? And I guarantee it would be public knowledge, as I find it hard to believe that all regulatory bodies in the world (eg Norway) would collude to hide such a feature.
Plenty of actual reasons why elon and his swasticar sucks. No need for hypotheticals on top.
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.
“Actually, if a Tesla could be proven do that, it would be done as a car company. Who in their right mind would buy something like that?”
You are hilarious. You think consumers have logic? They voted for Drumpf again after 4 years of hell. People STILL BUY teslas after musky did a full on nazi salute in public. If tesla were shown to kill immigrants on command, Americans would flock to buy even more of them.
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.
very true!
A quick search tells me this is only model 3 from Shanghai because they insisted. Do you know what models and years have this mechanical latch, because there is a lot of press about accidents made worse due to their absence.
Yes, but that speaks to my point, not against it.
What part of brand (brain) damage do you think Trump and Musk will stop at? We haven’t seen it yet.
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.