[sweden]

It is an interesting question. A while a go, 2 guys made a presentation at DEFCON with a presentation about their findings on hacking a Tesla Model S.

They were able to successfully get root access to the car's system (not chroot, real full root access) and with that they were able to fully access to the car's API within Tesla OS. They even showed a video about one of the guys driving the car at low speed and the other one remotely accessing to the car's Linux shell by SSH and shutting down the whole car while the first guy was riding.

The interesting thing is that for higher speeds, for example more than 50 km/h, the car seems to override any of the Linux systems and the root access becomes useless, it stops working.

In another words, the car is able to decouple itself from the Tesla OS.

You can check the presentation from those guys here: https://youtu.be/KX_0c9R4Fng?t=39m51s

[pritambaral]

While it is very reassuring that the car is able, the speedpoint chosen by Tesla – 50kmph — is not. I'd rather a car not be remote-controllable at anything more than a slow crawl, and 50kmph is quite capable of making such a heavy car dangerous.

[sweden]

I'm not sure what are the exact conditions for the Tesla OS to be overridden by other internal systems, 50 km/h was just a placeholder value for "lower speeds".