Ope, this Twitter thread was confirmed by the poster to be a joke. Disregard the story below! Tesla Inc can remotely mess with your truck, but they didn’t do so in this case.
If you’d like more Cybertruck coverage, you might find this article interesting: The Cybertruck is More Explosive than the Ford Pinto.
I’ll leave the coverage below for those curious, but the linked Twitter thread shows the sequence of events that ultimately ended in the Cybertruck driver saying something to the effect of “just kidding!”
The original story follows below:
A Tesla influencer known as DirtyTesla reported that his Cybertruck’s rear-wheel steering was remotely disabled… and not by his own request.
Sharing a screen capture on Twitter, he revealed that his truck’s diagnostic system flagged the feature as “disabled by request.”
When another user asked “By whose request?”, the influencer claimed, “Tesla disabled it remotely when they saw a post I made that they didn’t like.”
The Tweets
The Tweets tell the story… or is it the X’s now? Jeez, that doesn’t quite hit right. Twitter should hire a branding person to get that sorted.
And here’s a close up of that system message, in case you had a hard time reading it like I did.
This Twitter exchange raises serious questions about Tesla corporate staff’s ability to modify vehicle functionality remotely, potentially without owner consent or prior notice.
Big Brother is Watching (You Drive)
This isn’t the first time Tesla’s always-online approach has raised eyebrows. After a Cybertruck caught fire in Las Vegas, Elon Musk remotely unlocked the vehicle for police and provided them with several days of driving footage from the truck’s onboard cameras.
The case in Las Vegas left many wondering: how much data and video footage does Tesla collect, and who has access to it? Plus, if Tesla Inc can unlock your truck and export video from all of the interior and exterior cameras… what else can they do remotely? Uncomfortable questions to ask, and I’m not sure any driver will like the answers.
Now, we have a Tesla owner claiming his vehicle’s steering was altered after someone at Tesla read his social media criticism and apparently didn’t like what they saw. If true, this goes beyond privacy concerns… it raises safety concerns. Rear-wheel steering significantly changes how a vehicle handles. If an owner wasn’t explicitly informed that the feature was turned off, their truck could behave unpredictably the next time they take a sharp turn.
Tesla owners are probably wondering: how much control do they really have over their vehicles?
