So the first real tech story of 2025 isn't a product launch, it's a car snitching on itself, and I've been thinking about it all week.
Quick recap for anyone who had their phone off over the holiday: on New Year's Day, a rented Cybertruck exploded outside the Trump hotel in Las Vegas, killing the driver and hurting several bystanders nearby. Awful story, still very much unfolding, and I'm not going to speculate about the guy or his motives here because frankly nobody outside the investigation actually knows yet. What caught my attention as a person who writes about gadgets for a living was how fast Tesla was able to say "not us."
Within about a day, Elon Musk was posting that Tesla had pulled the vehicle's telemetry and could confirm the explosion wasn't caused by the truck itself, that it was fireworks and fuel canisters loaded into the bed, unrelated to the Cybertruck as a vehicle. A day. Not a week of forensic teardown, not "we're cooperating with investigators and will have more soon" — just, here's the data, we already looked.
And look, I get why that's reassuring if you're worried the stainless steel doorstop you paid $80,000 for is going to spontaneously combust. But sit with the other half of that sentence for a second: the company had complete remote access to a fine-grained log of what that truck was doing, moment to moment, from wherever their servers are, without anyone touching the vehicle. That's not new information exactly, we've known EVs phone home for years, but there's a difference between knowing it abstractly and watching it get used as evidence in real time on Twitter. It's the same feeling I got a few years back when a rental company remotely disabled a car because of a payment dispute while someone was still driving it. The convenience and the creep factor are the same feature.
I don't think this makes Tesla uniquely bad, to be clear. Basically every modern car with a cellular modem is doing some version of this now, GM, Ford, whoever. Cybertruck just happened to be the one in the news, so it's the one where the tradeoff got visible. My own car (a boring 2019 that I will drive until the wheels fall off, largely out of spite for how much new cars cost now) doesn't report anywhere near this much about me, and some days I think that's a feature, not a limitation.
There's also something almost funny, in a dark way, about how quickly "the car has an alibi" became a normal sentence to type. A decade ago that would've sounded like science fiction. Now it's Tuesday.
Anyway. CES kicks off in Vegas later this week, which is a weird bit of timing given everything, and I expect the show floor conversation is going to lean hard into "smart," "connected," and "AI-powered" for basically every category of device, cars very much included. I'll be doing my usual thing of reading the press releases from my couch instead of flying out (conference travel in January is a special kind of miserable, and I say that as someone who used to genuinely enjoy trade shows). If the last few CES cycles are any indication, we're going to see a dozen companies promise their fridge or TV or car is now smarter because it's connected to everything, and approximately none of them will explain what data is actually leaving the device and where it's going. That disclosure gap is the story I keep wanting someone to write and nobody does, because "here's a cool new gadget" gets more clicks than "here's what your cool new gadget is quietly telling on you."
None of this is really an argument against connected vehicles, for what it's worth. I'd genuinely rather live in a world where investigators can rule things in or out quickly instead of guessing. I just think we adopted the tradeoff pretty passively, a little bit at a time, and this week was one of those rare moments where you could actually see the wire.
If you're the type who reads the fine print on these things, it might be worth an hour some evening this week to go look at what your own car's app actually shares with the manufacturer. Most people never check. I hadn't, until this happened, and what I found in my dashboard settings was more detailed than I expected.