Oliver Haslam on August 7, 2023, 8:21 pm

Researchers Have Jailbroken Tesla To Unlock Paid Features For Free

Jailbreaking an iPhone is one thing, and jailbreaking a PS5 is another. But jailbreaking a car is a whole different board game — and that’s exactly what researchers say that they have been able to do.

Once jailbroken, the Tesla EV was instructed to enable features that would otherwise require an additional purchase such as FSD Beta. However, there’s a catch — they haven’t actually tested it yet, because that would require more work.

Researchers at Technische Universität Berlin say that physical access to the car is required in order to perform the jailbreak, so there is no chance of this being done remotely. At least, not yet.

The technique to carry out the jailbreak is reportedly called voltage glitching, with researcher Christian Werling saying that they alter the supply voltage of the AMD processor used to run Tesla’s in-car systems.

“If we do it at the right moment, we can trick the CPU into doing something else. It has a hiccup, skips an instruction and accepts our manipulated code. That’s basically what we do in a nutshell,” he said.

There’s further bad news for Tesla as well — the researchers say that the only way to mitigate what they were able to do would be to replace the hackable hardware.