This case shows how connected vehicle manufacturers can potentially weaponize data and connectivity against their own customers. According to TorqueNews, Tesla appears to be profiting directly from what could be described as integrity breaches in their data management, which is arguably more problematic than privacy breaches.

We sold a customer a Tesla, but when he took it to Tesla for a simple battery fix, they told him it was marked as salvage. Even though the title is clean, Tesla wouldn’t share details, wouldn’t restore supercharging, and wanted a crazy amount of money to fix it.

Why would anyone buy a Tesla given these risks? Yet people do, only to find their troubles with the brand unfolding immediately upon becoming owners.

Beyond Privacy: The Integrity Breach Crisis

In a privacy breach, customer data is exposed or misused—certainly harmful, but the financial damage often comes indirectly and is difficult to quantify. What we’re witnessing with Tesla is far more direct: arguably predatory and self-serving attacks on customers:

• Tesla claims their internal systems detected an accident that has no external verification
• They refuse to provide any details about this alleged incident
• They use this opaque determination to demand $12,000+ in repairs
• They’ve disabled features the customer paid for (supercharging)
• They’ve invalidated warranties despite legal documentation showing a clean title

Tesla’s Unjust Immoral Authority

Tesla has established itself as a unitary authority, potentially able to demand unlimited money from any owner without disclosing reasons. This system creates several concerning dynamics:

• Self-defined reality: Tesla’s internal systems effectively override legal documentation and physical evidence, creating their own version of the vehicle’s history that can’t be contested.
• Financial extraction mechanism: The opaque flagging system creates a direct pathway to extract additional revenue from customers who have little recourse.
• Closed ecosystem of control: Tesla positions itself as both the entity that identifies problems and the exclusive solution provider, with no independent verification.
• Circumvention of consumer protections: Traditional automotive consumer safeguards like state title systems, independent inspections, and lemon laws are effectively bypassed.
• Post-purchase control: Features the customer already paid for can be unilaterally disabled based on non-transparent determinations.

This creates a direct financial pipeline from data integrity issues to Tesla’s bottom line. If their systems fraudulently flag cars (or are designed to flag cars with minimal evidence), Tesla directly profits from imposed “repairs” and inspections by them and them alone.

Toxic Power of Tyrants

The power imbalance is toxic and abusive. The customer has no way to contest real-world determinations, verify real-world data, or even understand what triggered the flag. The real world gets replaced with Tesla “truther-ism,” as the company unjustly positions itself as both the detector of problems and the only authorized problem solver.

This business model resembles other controversial tech platforms where companies create problems they alone can solve—essentially manufacturing the demand for their own services. In other words, I’ve noticed several high-profile tech entrepreneurs with apartheid South African roots who were involved with PayPal have gone on to create dubious business models that prioritize abusive profit extraction over customer interests and fairness.

Data-Lordism Beatings Will Continue Until…

We’ve known since at least the 1970s that manufacturers should not be allowed to build closed ecosystems where they control data they don’t actually own (the experiences of people and their lives), let alone control the very definition of private asset condition and status. When you investigate the economics of a brand overriding real-world data and legal documentation with fabricated, proprietary, and unverifiable determinations… you see why the right-to-repair movement is decades old already.

Tesla ignores all the lessons learned and instead raises serious questions about consumer protection in an era where everything has become a miniaturized data center with a manufacturer maintaining control long after purchase. The automotive industry has historically had consumer protections like lemon laws, independent mechanics, and state-regulated titling processes. Tesla seems to have invented a way to circumvent these protections by implementing systems they won’t allow to be independently verified.

The story presents perhaps the worst form of digital data-lordism, where technology ownership becomes merely nominal where a manufacturer forcefully imposes their de facto control over a person’s life through an immoral data architecture.

Urgent Need to Dethrone a False Prophet

In this age of connected technology, we stand at a crossroads where the very concept of ownership is being redefined without consumer consent. The Tesla case illustrates how quickly traditional consumer protections can be eroded when digital systems are weaponized against their owners. Without immediate regulatory intervention and consumer awareness, this nihilist dystopian model of “pay more, own nothing” could spread like fascism in the 1930s. True ownership demands transparency, accountability, and the right to independent verification, principles that are fundamental to consumer rights based in sovereignty for both digital and physical realms.

Here’s a truly sad conclusion to a story about Tesla Autopilot running over child mannequins, even behind a wall, failing a simple safety test that LiDAR-enabled cars pass with ease.

An Electrek journalist had clearly reported what we’ve all seen. Then the TSLA attack dogs started coming for him to argue that Autopilot wasn’t enabled. So, as any journalist would, he looked more carefully and realized… Autopilot had fraudulently disengaged itself. Ooops.

The funny thing is that I missed that Autopilot disengaged at the last second, but the attacks from Tesla investors pointed it out and actually exposed video evidence of a shady practice from Tesla that has been reported in the past.

In NHTSA’s investigation of Tesla vehicles on Autopilot crashing into emergency vehicles on the highway, the safety agency found that Autopilot would disengage within less than one second prior to impact on average in the crashes that it was investigating…

This would suggest that the ADAS system detected the collision but too late and disengaged the system instead of applying the brakes. Now, it looks like the Rober video has caught this behavior on camera.

Busted.

Listen up, everyone. While we’ve had to watch as two very South African spoiled brats loudly take over the American defense industry to set piles of money on fire and throw Hitler salutes (thing one and thing two), the Europeans quietly and professionally have been building something that works. And works damn well.

Remember when we would say “quantity has a quality all its own” to explain success of Sherman tank swarms from North Africa all the way to liberating Polish death camps? Well, the Germans at Helsing just put that into practice in 2025. Their Resilience Factory isn’t just a damn impressive building – it’s a statement of intent.

Resilience Factories are Helsing’s high-efficiency production facilities designed to provide nation states with local and sovereign manufacturing capacities. Helsing is set to build Resilience Factories across the European continent, with the ability to scale manufacturing rates to tens of thousands of units in case of a conflict. The first Resilience Factory (RF-1) is operational in Southern Germany and has an initial monthly production capacity of more than 1,000 HX-2.

One thousand drones per month to start

Let that sink in.

Then imagine what happens when they hit their stride across Europe. As my old man used to say while spitting sunflower seeds off the porch, “future arrives when you’re looking the other way.” And my fellow security industry experts, America has been looking the wrong way.

The factory pumping out the Helsing HX-2 is the real deal. An X-wing to fight the evil oligarchs? Yes, I know how that sounds, but sometimes life imitates art for a reason.

100 kilometers of range on battery power alone. That’s not just impressive, that’s game-changing.

We’re talking one operator, multiple drones in a swarm, and electronic warfare resistance built right in (ask me about Russian container ships weaponized by Chinese hackers).

You know what our man Patton would have said about this? “Fixed fortifications are monuments to man’s stupidity.” The Helsing is producing fixed wings, which are very much not fixed in time or space. They aren’t even manned, because women make great pilots if you catch my drift. These are the harbingers of a new kind of European defense posture shifting into fifth gear, while “America First” means defense going in reverse (ask me about Elon Musk funding AfD to be a new Nazi platform in Brandenburg, where he built his Nazi factory of Swasticars).

I mean the Pentagon clearly has been writing checks that some Silicon Valley techbros cash without any real intent to deliver outcomes (ask me about Henry Ford taking millions and never delivering a damn thing in WWI, leaving Allies high and dry because he favored the Germans).

The Ford Motor Co., according to the War Department, received from Wilson’s administration $249,000 for tools which were never delivered. I suppose Henry has them yet. He also has the money, unless he spent it on this election. The Ford Motor Co., for tractors: Number delivered, none. Amount paid, $1,299,000. Where are those tractors? They might be converted into golden chariots, for all I know. The Ford Motor Co., for spare parts: Number delivered, none. Amount paid, $5,517,000.

Boy oh boy, that Henry Ford was a real Elon Musk, wasn’t he?

Helsing is on the right side of history and has been quietly building the future because of their past. As in building, not bloviating. Ukraine is the obvious proving ground, and so far, we’re seeing proof positive.

How many of the South African fever-dream Cybertrucks have made it into battle, let alone survived their first hour in operation? Oh, right, Russia couldn’t get even two of their million-dollar Tesla fluffy battle bots rolling into the field without immediate device failure.

As the great Yogi Berra might put it: “The future of warfare ain’t what it used to be.” Tesla drone swarm lobbying now makes about as much sense as the State Department blowing $400 million on Cybertrucks after Elon Musk tampered with government procurement documents using the promise his drones can float… all the way to Mars.

Good luck running a navy that has nothing to show for its excessive corruption but a fleet of flammable boat anchors. Talk about a salute to Hitler.

Either adapt to this new reality of Helsing delivering the future of drone warfare, or become as relevant as Tesla kitchen knives made from “magic Mars dust” being sold as a high-dollar defense against reinforced water tanks. History repeats in the least amusing ways.

The choice is upon the world. The clock is ticking. America has embarrassed and degraded itself with Hegseth, Thiel, Musk… being hollowed out with racist snakeoil salesmen on showboat platforms of tech fantasy. Meanwhile, eyes should have been on Helsing the whole time, a company not waiting for permission to innovate in the necessary defense of Ukraine.

Remember what the always honest and sincere legendary General Creighton Abrams said when routing the Nazis: “They’ve got us surrounded again, the poor bastards.”

That’s like Helsing revolutionizing drone warfare while surrounded by backwards-thinking South Africans working for the backwards-thinking Russians to make America go backwards again (MAGbA). The Americans appear completely outmatched now in the defense industry, and will fall even further behind the more they let those two backwards-thinking chaotic things from South Africa have any say.