A Tesla owner claims that control of their vehicle was handed over to a European driver after the company accidentally filled in the wrong VIN information on the continent.
Reddit user Robert Quattlebaum, u/darconeous, claims in a story posted to r/teslamotors that shortly after taking delivery of a Model 3, his partner discovered that something weird was happening to it. She first noticed that the trunk and frunk were open and the A/C system was going at full blast as she approached the car.
More alarmingly, the garage door, which was linked to the car, had been mysteriously opened. By the time the poster was free to look at the problem, another family member had borrowed it for an errand.
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He, therefore, decided to look at his account on the computer to be sure that they hadn’t been hacked, but found nothing. The car was gone.
“Now very concerned, I checked the Tesla app on my phone,” he wrote. “For a moment I saw a brief flash of the picture of my car, which was immediately replaced with options to look into new vehicles to purchase. My car was gone.”
They called Tesla customer service and were greeted by a confused representative who quickly escalated the issue. After several minutes of explaining the problem, providing information, and waiting on hold, they got an answer.
Quattlebaum claims that he was told that a European Tesla employee had accidentally entered the wrong VIN information when assigning a vehicle to a customer there. That, allegedly, gave the customer control over several important features, through the Tesla App.
Indeed, the smartphone app can control a vehicle’s climate controls, check on range, manage payment information, purchase upgrades, and more. It also allegedly gave the presumably very frustrated and confused European Tesla owner access to the poster’s garage door.
Fortunately, the customer service representative was able to sort the issue out, handing the Quattlebaum back control of the vehicle. Tesla does not operate a press relations office, so we have not yet confirmed this story or verified its possibility. Teslas have, however, previously been targeted by hacks that handed controls of American vehicles to a European programmer.
Some commentors also shared stories about vaguely similar events that happened to them. Quattlebaum, meanwhile, has been left feeling somewhat unsafe.
“This was, as they say, a complete clusterfuck,” they wrote. “I’m left feeling somewhat violated and shaken by the fact that this was even possible without physical possession of the vehicle or my participation.”
