In its breathless coverage of how Tesla and Elon Musk “helped crack the Cybertruck explosion case”, the Telegraph inadvertently reveals a stark truth that should alarm anyone concerned about fundamental civil liberties. The report lauds the role of Tesla’s data in the investigation, noting how the wealth of information transmitted by the vehicle allowed “Tesla employees and investigators to establish the cause of the explosion and where the vehicle had travelled from”.
It goes on to explain that “using information from Tesla’s charging stations, police were able to retrace the car’s journey from Colorado to Las Vegas”.
Then comes the slippage – the part that, until now, no mainstream media organisation has been prepared to say out loud. It should give us all pause.
For years, those of us raising concerns about the implications of such technology have been dismissed as “conspiracy theorists”, “right-wing reactionaries”, or “disinformation pedlars”.
Yet here, in black and white, is an admission of a profound shift in how mobility – freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, the right to the city, freedom to roam – is being reconfigured at the interface between digital technology and the Big State in what are still (albeit nominally) liberal democracies:
Just a few years ago a vehicle’s manufacturer would have been of little help to law enforcement, particularly once a vehicle had rolled off the production line. However, advanced modern vehicles are able to provide a stream of real-time data that can prove crucial to police investigations.
The admission is all the more stark precisely because it slips out inadvertently, almost naively, in the Telegraph’s perfectly understandable excitement at the idea that technology like this could one day prevent horrific crimes. But what, I wonder, do we lose in return?
The petrol engine, for all its inefficiencies, represented a kind of freedom – a mechanical embodiment of Isaiah Berlin’s ‘negative liberty’, the absence of external interference. You started the car, you drove, and, a few fleeting outposts of the state notwithstanding, you were an untracked vector, your movements your own, your autonomy unchallenged.
But as the Telegraph inadvertently makes clear, the electric car revolution has little to do with sustainable living or environmental stewardship. Instead, it heralds an era of unprecedented surveillance and control, cloaked in the language of progress, of caring, of being kind, of saving the planet. The real innovation here is not in cutting emissions but in enabling the incursion of the state, the regulators, the snoopers, the bureaucrats, into what were once private domains.
Today, the tracking of a terrorist’s movements may seem an unambiguous good. Few would argue against using such tools to prevent the loss of innocent life. But once this infrastructure exists, the potential for abuse becomes glaringly obvious. It’s no great leap to imagine a future where certain individuals – those deemed undesirable for reasons both legitimate and arbitrary – find their mobility curtailed; their vehicles remotely disabled for “the good of the community”, for Gaia, for the NHS, for 15 minute cities.
In this brave new world, the car no longer represent freedoms, but subjugation. The very tool that once symbolised autonomy instead tethering us to networks of surveillance, regulation and control.
Dr. Frederick Attenborough is the Executive Director of Communications and Research at the Free Speech Union.
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