UPDATE: Busted by the Verge, sorry everybody. Fuck.
*Original Post*
Article: Tesla Allegedly Disables Rapper’s Cybertruck After Song Critique.
Just wanted to say, huge props for editing the post and title when you found out it was debunked. That’s so important and too many people just don’t take that step when they learn, so upvoted for that
My late friend Robotech_Master once said to me that there are things too bad to be true
Just one more reason not to buy a Tesla ever.
And honestly, any of those cars that can be remotely deactivated. I’m shopping now, and I really don’t like all the tracking in cars these days…
So you’re going to buy a used car
Yup, but I need to be careful on years because newer used cars still have this crap.
Vintage!
Man, if all electric cars can do this bullshit, then I think I’m gonna just be stuck with an internal combustion engine no matter how bad they are for the environment.
Ain’t no way I’m gonna get into a vehicle that can be remotely disabled by a jackass.
This isn’t specific to electric cars, vehicles equipped with On Star can be remotely disabled in the event of theft (and by extension I imagine a legal injunction). I imagine this extends to other vehicles also.
The real problem is the OTA updates and always-online nature of modern vehicles, not necessarily what powers them.
Yes, but I don’t have to buy a car with OnStar in it. It seems like every electric car has these OTA features at least in the states. In internal combustion cars that can avoid those features. I’d be more than happy to buy any one of these electric cars if I control the updates and there’s no always on connection.
At least w/ OnStar, there are documented ways to disable it, and it’s honestly not all that difficult (basically remove power to the OnStar device). Some cars are more integrated, so disabling that crap is a lot more difficult w/o breaking anything important.
No for sure I hear what you’re saying, onstar was just a handy example, other vehicles have OTA updates also and systems to disable the vehicle.
My point was the tech isn’t specific to BEV it’s becoming a “feature” in modern cars more broadly
Absolutely. If you care about this, search for a YT video or something about how to disable it, and they’ll walk you through it and list the caveats. For example, sometimes it’ll just show a warning on the infotainment center, and other times unrelated functions will break.
BEVs certainly started the trend, but once they showed people will put up w/ it, combustion vehicles followed suit.
Except that it’s all cars that do this why would the car being powered by electricity have any bearing. All cars have computers these days.
No, there’s a few incredibly cheap cars that do not have these features. Also, I’ll just buy used cars. These features don’t exist in hardly any car before, like, 2015.
These devices exist as aftermarket ad-ons and are frequently added by used car dealerships.
I’m fairly sure my car from 2016 has an immobiliser in it. In theory, if the car company wanted to utterly destroy their reputation, they could activate it.
The best defence against this is just how moronically stupid doing so would be. Every other car company knows this.
Yes but most cars with an immobilizer can not be remotely activated unless a specific system is installed which is normally offered as a premium feature. Like if I had a keyless start Ford from 2014 Ford couldn’t remotely shut that car off.
Why is anyone still driving piece of shit teslas
seems like this should go to court - make tesla prove these claims, and explain how they’re allowed to stifle both free speech and parody.
because this is absolute bullshit
Hey maybe we shouldn’t have a world where car companies can remotely deactivate your vehicle if you say mean things about them?
If car companies can’t remotely deactivate your vehicle, how will they be able to extort you and harass you and sell you out to the police?
This has been standard in every car made after 2003
If your car is newer than that, the police can request the car company disable your engine.
It’s fucked up and evil, but it isn’t new, just the first time it’s been blatantly abused
I think you’re off by a decade there. My 2010 car has no mobile connectivity.
Cars having satellite gps has been standard for most manufacturers since the early 2000s
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_navigation_system
And? Tell me you have no idea what GPS is or how it works.
My guy doesn’t know anything about how GPS works
Not suitable for this.
GPS is a purely one-way method, with the satellites transmitting only their position and a timecode, leaving the receiver to do the triangulation. And if they did send any sort of custom data packets over that method, it would just confuse the crap out of every other receiver across most of the world, causing potential device crashes, drawing attention from ham operators worldwide…
And also massively pissing off the US military. Turns out a lot of their equipment and munitions make use of GPS and INS, so fucking with those satellites is a no-go.
You might be off by a couple of years there. And even if you aren’t, the 3G network those cars would’ve relied on for communications has been shut down so remotely doing anything to your 2004 car today would be impossible.
Off by a decade or so.
Wrong, that didn’t start until like 2015 or later even.
I believe before that.
Imagine:
You have parking lots full of your cars that can’t sell because your CEO is basically in the top 5 of horrible humans.
You have horror stories about kids burning alive in the cars because they couldn’t open the doors.
You have a Rapper, with social following, in Detroit, Motor City, with a 100k model of your car who makes a song about how you’re fucking up, and you shut down his 100k car and send a c&d.
Could you imagine a PR department being this bad at its job?
He could make a music video burning the thing to the ground and make his money back.
I thought Tesla fired their PR department?
No they just replaced it with a keyboard in a room full of cats with grok interpreting the random input.
They would never care for a room of cats. They just put the keyboard under the front door mat.
I’m sure somebody is taking responsibility for it. You can’t do stupid shit and not have somebody else to fire.
That’s strange you don’t think the PR department takes its marching orders from their furher directly
A company being able to deactivate your purchased property is absolutely dystopian
Not absolutely, because a company being able to deactivate your purchased property for ulterior reasons is more dystopian.
I also suspect the rapper wasn’t exactly praising the cybertruck, so that would add “for
insultingmisrepresenting? a company”. That’s even more dystopian.You don’t have to suspect anything, watch the video. He’s hyping the Cybertruck, hyping, “I’m RICH BEEYOTCH!” This is Tesla trying to distance themselves from that message.
While that song and message are shit, so is Tesla.
This is peak face eating leopards content all around.
Also I wonder if a white rapper singing the same song would have had his shit-pyramid disabled as fast.
Tesla factories have had a racism problem for years.
I have have had it up to here with people calling Elon a racist Nazi with a mangled penis.
Tell that to the gaming industry
I’m just glad they got a power hungry, austistic lunatic in charge now, so everyone can see this is absolutely the end game, before this becomes normalized and people like me get called retarded for not wanting a car that can be remote deactivated.
Autism doesn’t make someone an asshole. Let’s not normalise hatred of neurodivergence
Thank you for calling this out. Autistic should not be derogatory!
The user also dropped the R slur. The “people like me” part stands out to me as a little suspect as well.
I think his point is that Musk is trying to normalize calling people that word on Twitter. I didn’t get the impression the user was in support of using that word.
Don’t worry about vague stuff, who cares what they think people like them are - just tell them to blow it out their ass for using a slur.
Removed by mod
any examples of real insults ?
“Lame.” Now THERE is a REAL insult. What’s the matter? Can’t walk? Ha! Lame. Sit down, lameboi.
I see no difference between calling him autistic and calling him narcissistic, except that one of those two mental disorders is one he claims to have a diagnosis for. Let’s fry the bigger fish first and then circle back to autism.
It doesn’t but a neurodivergent person can absolutely be an arsehole.
Its not a magic label that makes everything “quirky” and “eccentric”.
Nobody said that. They were simply correcting the misconception that autism is bad.
And i was correcting the misconception that just because someone is neurodivergent doesn’t make them immune to being an arsehole.
Neurodivergent people are people, with all that entails.
Nobody said that.
Nobody said autism is bad (in the chain im replying to), but here we are.
Two statements that never happened with two corrections that aren’t needed apparently.
Verge reported there are signs the video may be fix and Tesla posted to confirm that it was indeed fake.
https://www.theverge.com/tesla/757594/tesla-cybertruck-deactivated-viral-video-fake
Tesla’s reply: “This is fake – that’s not our screen. Tesla does NOT disable vehicles remotely.”
They do though, so thats a total lie. Try getting into your car that you paid for firmware, see if tesla locks you down.
I’ll note none of my old cars have this problem. Don’t buy new cars people.
Normally I would care that it’s a fake story but in this case I don’t mind spreading it. That guy needs to pay for what he has done to our country.
The reason to care is that when Tesla does pull shenanigans with their cars, now everyone’s going to just call it “fake news”. This incident has just bought them all the cover in the world to be assholes.
No, when you spread disparaging lies about someone it only makes their critics look less trustworthy in the future. It’s like the boy who cried wolf.
Fake news is the tool of the enemy. You don’t need it when there is plenty of truth available as ammunition.
The worst part is, I don’t think you’re even joking
You know I might be just crazy enough to have even upvoted the original post.
Seems unfair for only one side to have weaponized fake news
That’s always the justification isn’t it?
See all this does is mislead people who might otherwise talk about legitimate grievances about Tesla. Now they have easily disproved bullshit to spew and will look like idiots who are trapped in liberal media bubbles if they try to talk about this with anyone who’s paying attention.
The only advantage we have is the truth, don’t let that go.
And I am ready to look the other way, because why should I care about Musk when he hates me? There are other priorities.
Actually, I will begin by not even fact-checking the original post. That’s right. I will vibe-comment (I hope I’m using this at least somewhat right. I’m very old in internet years, I’m so sorry).
Clippy moment 📎💬
Unacceptable. It should be illegal to even build the capability to brick someone else’s property
This is a major feature of nearly all cars now. Dealerships can remotely track and disable cars when people fall behind on their payments. That’s because so many people fall behind on payments nowadays, they need easy mechanisms for dealing with it. America is cooked.
Got to love it. My crappy car doesn’t even have Bluetooth, but it does have a CD auto changer. Can’t brick my car.
same with the F-35s sold to other countries. and those cost a lot more than even a cybertruck. imagine it being disabled mid-flight. probably entirely possible.
I mean, that’s a tiny bit different. That’s something you want to be sure will never end up aiding a terrorist attack against you.
Cybertrucks only kill people accidentally.
as far as I know (which is not a whole lot) terrorists only fly commercial planes. though I’m sure you can probably find the F-35 Handbook on the War Thunder forums.
That’s the great thing: the government then get to decide who or what a terrorist is! - including oil rich middle East countries
Im pretty sure usaf flies f-35
So here’s the neat part! They just make it so that you technically are renting the car and so they can brick it up all they want since technically they own the vehicle!
that’s not the case here though
They’ll pull the same crap they do with digital content you “buy.” Technically you’re just buying a license to use the vehicle, not actually buying the vehicle itself.
I don’t disagree, but in this case that is not true, because that is not what the terms and conditions say.
This should indocate to everyone that you cannot rely on any car to work that has this capability.
You say that, but your avatar is not Clippy.
Oi! Don’t bring clippy into this! He was an innocent clip from a better era! More like a qevlarr@lemmy.world moment 👎🖕!!
Edit: lol my poor clippy just getting hated on
I agree. I was referring to Louis Rossmann’s Clippy campaign that we should not accept this as consumers but we want technology to help us, like Clippy
Edit: let’s not mass downvote for an innocent misunderstanding, even if they worded it a bit strongly. C’mon now
Those monsters can’t downvite clippy, he’s being held captive against his will.
Honestly, I kinda want to make a clippy bot, hook it into a self hosted LLM and have it roleplay as clippy trapped by Microsoft. It would be a hoot for 30 minutes or so.
“Free speech absolutist”
Anyone who buys a fucking motor vehicle that comes with Terms and Conditions agreement, let alone one that can be spontaneously and remotely turned off… you’re a fucking moron. And Tesla needs to be sued into oblivion. That shit should NOT be legal.
Anyone who buys a fucking motor vehicle that comes with Terms and Conditions agreement
Increasingly looking like “all of them”.
Won’t catch me signing one, I promise you that.
Buy old and give your restoration shops less money than you’d spend on a new car, and have a dependable, easy to repair, non government controllable vehicle. Thats what i do.
Lol, Cybercucks getting what they deserve. Don’t drive a swasticar if you don’t want consequences. It was Tesla, this time. Next time, it could just be a citizen looking to enact a bit of justice.
Inb4 douchebags defending their Tesla because they bought it “before Elon was crazy”. Your lack of awareness does not excuse your bad choices. Sell your Tesla.
You are dividing the working class just like the billionaires want you to do. You are demanding that people make a sacrifice of tens of thousands of dollars to accomplish very little.
This is another fucking purity test that divides the left and makes us incapable of handling the existential threat that is the republican party.
People who bought cybertrucks? Yeah, fuck 'em. Elon’s right-wing bullshit was very public by the point the cybertruck was released. Those people aren’t with us anyway.
But you’re discounting over a million people in the US, who generally lean very left, who generally also have the finances to help support political action against this extraordinarily corrupt and dangerous right-wing regime.
Kill the snake, then we can go back to squabbling.
I’m focusing the working class by denigrating those who fund a billionaire, which comes at the cost of at least forty to fifty thousand dollars per item (car)?
Really, dude? Are you that disconnected from all us poor people?
Selling your Tesla is an odd take. To whom are condoning the purchase of a Tesla?
To some asshole who will still buy a Tesla, duh
This is a good case to battle the shit out of Tesla in court and set a landmark verdict on the “you buy but don’t own” abuse.
Usually this would however require that courts are capable of reaching proper verdicts, that the government actually cared about the people, that consumer protection agencies had any footing etc. Alas, all of them are infiltrated by the big capital corporations.
Also, how is it protected from a song? Satire and parody are fair game.
or his next hit song: burn down the dealerships /s
I mean, maybe it could work right now, considering how elmo and dump had a falling out. People might be able to leverage dumps pettiness to get a verdict on something like this. Now would be the time to try, though.
I think this actually has a chance, but only because it affects millionaires. in any case the outcome would be very positive as it would apply elsewhere.
Eh effecting millionaires has less effect realistically, but if this could hit the billionaires by having a large settlement that cuts into revenue and effects the stock price you may see a change in tune regarding this type of behavior. Either way I agree this one could actually do something and considering the short term thinking of this administration I could see dump pushing this to Rule against tesla to spite elmo and then consequently giving us a default rulling for other vehicles. What’s the saying a broken clock can still be right twice a day, gotta take the small wins where we can right now.
![[UPDATE: fake] They made his car "cease & desist"](https://lemmus.org/pictrs/image/6609c476-3552-4e96-bcb9-0ae04d5118d5.webp){kind=link}
