A vehicle being able to be remotely disabled is a big red flag all by itself.
A company that will disable your vehicle while it's in operation because they're mad at you is a company that nobody should do business with under any circumstances whatsoever. (I'm assuming the story is true for the sake of argument. I don't know that it is.)
This is not the first time Tesla has done it, either. Before the 3 was released, a customer found some references to it in their software and made some posts.
Next thing they know, their vehicle's firmware was forcibly downgraded to a version that had no references, was forcibly version-locked at that firmware version, and had the Ethernet and OBD ports disabled.
Seriously, I've been sounding this alarm for so long and it's (nearly) always dismissed. I want my car to behave like my guitar: Do exactly what I tell it to do. Be an extension of my person!
I would be amazed if there are not interlocks to prevent an update while in drive. On normal updates there is definitely an interlock, plus a timer, but theoretically it is possible.
Here in Sweden programming a feature allowing this or participating in the activation of this feature would be a crime called allmänfarlig vårdslöshet. The crime would be regarded as serious, due to the detailed planning, and would lead to everyone involved going to prison for two years.
Why haven't the people who did this been arrested? Surely the US too, has laws against public endagerment?
It's actually possible that I should send an e-mail to a prosecutor, and I guess I will. It's probably against the regulations specifying how cars must be built too, but it isn't my job to care about that, I just inform.
Edit: They don't actually sell the Cybertruck here in Sweden though. Hmm. Maybe just a quick e-mail.
Edit: There are seems to be some hoax claims. I guess if that's true, that's defamation from the rapper instead. Very stupid in the case.
Well yeah, if you wanted to make someone crash their car because you didn't like their speech, you wouldn't make the dashboard say "your car is about to crash because we don't like your speech". You'd make it say something like "failed update."
You might not even have a mechanism to push error messages. You might just push a corrupted update package to them.
It's not clearly readable and you might need to stop the video, but the red box above update failed say it quite loud that it's because they got a c&d and the cybertruck was deactivated
I'd say something like how this shouldn't be legal (and it might not be, idk I'm neither American nor a lawyer)... but my sympathy is quite limited since you made the conscious decision to buy a damn Tesla.
A company that will disable your vehicle while it's in operation because they're mad at you is a company that nobody should do business with under any circumstances whatsoever. (I'm assuming the story is true for the sake of argument. I don't know that it is.)