Hacker News Reader

Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, but if you steal a Tesla, you've basically stolen an illiquid tracking device on wheels with a shallow secondary parts market. It's more economical to steal a police car. What am I missing?

View on HN

You've got a good point. It's almost like what happened with the Twitter hack. But what I'm wondering is that isn't there any way to make the car completely offline that it never communicates with the servers?

Build a makeshift Faraday Cage around the car and drive around like that.

Wouldn't replacing the cellular antenna with a resistor achieve the same effect?

If thought about this quite a bit since I got my Model Y. Disabling the API would probably be quite a bit of work, certainly more than 10 minutes on the side of the road. My guess is that all of that stuff is buried in the on-board computer and not a separate device like in some other cars. It would probably even be difficult to snip the antenna as it doesn't really have an external "fin" like most cars these days.

I guess the best you could do would be to use a GPS scrambler of some sort and force the car to report its location in the middle of the Atlantic or something.

There are plenty of reasons to steal a car for "temporary" reasons. Drug couriering, to commit other crimes, etc.

Yea, but Tesla cars update their lat-lon continuously so you would be able to watch the car drive around on a map. If anything, I think this would make it even less desirable to use to commit a crime.

"The bank robbers are on 4th street. Now, they are turning westbound onto Main st. etc."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com