The moment that went missing
Take a normal car to a normal mechanic and something specific happens: you hand him the keys.
It’s such a small act that nobody thinks about it. But it’s the whole thing. You chose to hand them over. He can’t touch the car until you do. And when the job is done, you get them back — and his access ends.
The law even has a name for this. Handing over keys creates a bailment: temporary custody, real duties of care, and a clear end. It’s how valets, coat checks, parking garages and repair shops have worked for a century.
Now take a Tesla in for service. You tap a button in the app to say you’ve arrived. You walk away.
Nobody asks you for a key card. Nobody asks you for anything — because there is nothing to hand over. They were already inside.
Rivian writes it into the contract. Once you request service, you authorize their personnel to unlock, access, and operate your vehicle with no prior notice.
That’s the argument in four words. No prior notice is only possible if the permission was never yours to give.
And notice what else is missing: the return. There’s no moment when you get the keys back, because they were never handed over. The access doesn’t end when you drive off the lot. It goes quiet until the next time they want it.
That is the difference between lending someone your car and someone simply having a key to it. One ends. The other doesn’t.
The simple version
Your car is a computer now. Steering, brakes, locks, charging, the battery — all of it runs on software the manufacturer writes.
And your car will only run their software. It checks for their digital signature before it runs anything, the way a bouncer checks a wristband. You can’t write your own. You can’t inspect theirs. You can’t decline their updates forever.
That means the company decides what your car is allowed to do. Not once, at the factory. Continuously, for as long as you own it.
Imagine buying a house, getting the deed, making the final payment — and the builder keeps a key. He promises he’ll only use it for repairs. Maybe he means it. But you can’t change the locks, and the contract you signed says he can come in.
That’s the deal now. Not because anyone snuck it past you. Because it’s how the product is built.
Let’s be fair about what they can’t do
This argument gets lost when people overstate it, so let’s give the other side its best case.
Tesla says it does not arbitrarily shut down customer cars mid-drive. Critical systems like steering and braking are designed to be isolated from simple over-the-air disablement while the vehicle is moving. Take all of that as true.
It doesn’t help much.
Those remote channels still exist. The manufacturer still holds real power over the car after you’ve paid for it. And that residual power is exactly what makes ownership feel incomplete — because it is incomplete.
A parked car can be immobilized. Charging can be cut off. Features can be deleted. Doors can be unlocked. Cameras and location tracking keep running. Every one of those is your car, their decision.
So the claim here isn’t that Tesla is going to drive your car away while you’re in it. The claim is narrower and much harder to argue with:
They decide what your car can do, and you cannot stop them.
This isn’t hypothetical
They’ve already done every version of this.
They can take back what you paid for. In 2020, a man bought a used Model S at auction. It had Autopilot. He paid for a car with Autopilot. Weeks after he drove it home, Tesla reached in and removed the feature, because the previous owner had paid for it and he hadn’t. His car was worth less overnight and he had done nothing. Tesla restored it only after the story hit the press.
They can make the car worse. Tesla pushed an update that reduced charging speed and range on cars people already owned. Owners sued. Tesla settled.
They can cut you off. Salvage-title Teslas are banned from the Supercharger network. Permanently.
They can brick it. A Rivian update in 2023 accidentally killed the infotainment systems in an undetermined number of R1T and R1S trucks. Some needed physical repair. That one was a mistake — which is exactly the point. The reach was already there.
They can withhold what’s already yours. During Hurricane Irma, Tesla remotely unlocked extra battery range so Florida owners could evacuate further. A genuinely kind act. Also an admission: that battery capacity was sitting in cars people had bought, locked by software.
And it doesn’t require self-driving. In 2015, two researchers remotely steered and disabled a Jeep Cherokee — a car with no autonomy at all — over its cellular connection. If outsiders could do that through a flaw, a manufacturer holding the signing keys is obviously not more limited.
And this isn’t a Tesla story. BMW tried charging a monthly fee for heated seats. Ford has patented remote feature disabling and repossession assistance. John Deere built the whole playbook on tractors. Tesla is just the most honest about the architecture.
And it’s watching
Your car knows where you sleep. Where you pray. Which doctor you see. Which lawyer’s office you parked outside of. How fast you take the on-ramp.
A Senate investigation led by Ron Wyden and Ed Markey found that automakers were sharing and selling driver data — including location — on a vast scale, and obtaining “consent” through deceptive design. Hyundai handed data from 1.7 million cars to the broker Verisk for a little over $1 million: about 61 cents a car. GM bundled the data-sharing agreement together with safety notifications, so refusing surveillance meant refusing to be told your alarm had gone off.
Reuters reported that Tesla employees circulated footage from customers’ car cameras internally, including images from inside people’s garages.
And Markey’s letter to the FTC named the worst case plainly: vehicle location data has been used by abusive partners to track domestic violence victims.
This is where “we don’t access it” stops being reassuring. It’s a promise. The camera is a fact. Promises are written by people you’ve never met and revised in emails you won’t read.
Why this has to happen now
Carmakers are wiring AI directly into the guts of these vehicles — cabin cameras, driver monitoring, voice assistants, self-driving systems.
Right now those are add-ons. Give it a few years and they’ll be load-bearing, and every proposal will get the same answer: we can’t take it out, the car won’t run without it.
That answer will be true by then. It isn’t true yet.
Ask anyone who tried to regulate smartphones after the fact. You get one window, and it closes when the thing you want to regulate becomes the thing the product is made of.
The precedent for acting already exists, by the way. When Washington decided that foreign-controlled software in American cars was a national security risk, it wrote a rule restricting it. The federal government has already conceded the principle that who controls a car’s code is a matter of public concern. The only open question is whether that concern extends to Americans whose cars are controlled by American companies.
Where this stands right now
Congress has been circling the edges of this for years without touching the center.
The REPAIR Act — which would force automakers to give owners and independent shops the same repair data and tools the dealers get — has now cleared a House subcommittee in two consecutive Congresses and died in full committee both times. Cosponsors have fallen from 56 to 45. It’s genuinely bipartisan, which in this Congress is rare enough to be worth something: Hawley and Cotton and Fetterman and Booker are all on the same bill.
What actually moved was a thinner version. In May 2026 the House Energy and Commerce Committee passed the Motor Vehicle Modernization Act 48–1, carrying a watered-down repair provision that mostly writes a decade-old industry handshake into law. It’s headed to the House floor.
Meanwhile Massachusetts voters passed a right-to-repair law overwhelmingly, automakers sued to block it, and years later the case is still in the courts.
Here’s what matters for this argument: none of these bills touch it. Repair access is necessary and it isn’t sufficient. You can win every repair fight and still own a car that the manufacturer can reach into, monitor, throttle, and switch off.
Nobody has drafted that bill yet. That’s not a dead end. That’s an opening.
What we’re asking for
Four things. None of them are radical. All of them describe how buying something used to work.
1. What you bought stays bought. No remotely disabling or degrading any function the car had when you paid for it. Safety recalls are the only exception, and they have to be documented as such.
2. Tell people up front. Every remote command the manufacturer can send to the vehicle, listed in plain language, before the customer signs. Not buried in the terms of service.
3. A real off switch. An owner-controlled connectivity disconnect at the hardware level — not a setting the manufacturer administers. It can’t be allowed to disable safety-critical driving functions. And before anyone says it’s impossible: Rivian already ships a software version of this in some markets. The engineering objection is already dead.
4. Consent you can take back. If a manufacturer retains software control, that access can’t be exercised, transferred, or revoked without the owner’s affirmative and revocable consent. That’s the difference between consent and a condition of sale.
If you want to move this: House Energy and Commerce, Commerce Manufacturing and Trade subcommittee, and Senate Commerce. The FTC is faster than Congress and already looking at connected-vehicle data. So are state attorneys general. You don’t need a new statute to argue that “we can brick your car and you can’t refuse” is an unfair practice.
The line
We have a word for an arrangement where you pay full price, hold the physical object, and someone else keeps the right to decide how and whether you may use it.
That word is not ownership. That’s a lease with extra steps and no end date.
Ownership has always meant one thing above all: the right to keep people out. If you can’t lock someone out of your property, it isn’t your property.
You’d never hand your keys to a stranger and just hope for the best.
You already did. You clicked Accept.