A man who rented Ford vehicles from Enterprise Rent-a-Car reported having the ability to remotely start, stop, lock, and unlock the vehicles long after he returned them not just once, but a second time four months after the first. Advertisementįurther Reading Five months after returning rental car, man still has remote controlgreentheonly’s discovery reveals a risk posed not just to Tesla owners but drivers of virtually any vehicle that has onboard devices that store personal data or provide remote tracking. Based on conversations he’s had, he believes Tesla official procedure calls for removed MCUs to be sent intact back to Tesla and for damaged units to be hammered down to ensure that connectors are sufficiently damaged and then thrown into the trash.

The researcher, who goes by the handle greentheonly, told me he obtained 12 of the units off of eBay from pages like this one. Most commonly, it’s to replace a faulty device or to upgrade to a newer, more advanced device model that improves the vehicle's autopilot. Tesla service stations remove MCUs for several reasons. Examples included phone books from connected cell phones, call logs containing hundreds of entries, recent calendar entries, Spotify and W-Fi passwords stored in plaintext, locations for home, work, and all places navigated to, and session cookies that allowed access to Netflix and YouTube (and attached Gmail accounts).Īll 13 of the devices showed that their last location was at a Tesla service center, an indication that they were removed by an authorized Tesla technician. Each one of the devices stored a trove of sensitive information despite being retired. The researcher, who described himself as a “Tesla tinkerer that's curious about how things work,” recently gained access to 13 Tesla MCUs-short for media control units-that were removed from electric vehicles during repairs and refurbishments. But those benefits require storing heaps of personal information that an amateur researcher found can reveal owners’ most sensitive data. Among other things, they display Netflix or YouTube videos, run Spotify, connect to Wi-Fi, and of course store phone numbers of contacts. Tesla infotainment systems are a marvel to behold.

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