[xgbi]

From what I read somewhere, Tesla was able to do that because they have remote ssh capability.

In at least one instance, they fixed the cars manually by running a massive remote command on all cars after a messed up update: https://lobste.rs/s/v42zil/former_tesla_employee_ssh_d_as_ma...

I wouldn’t call that very reliable , but they indeed do it regularly

[FireBeyond]

And it's not like they'd ever abuse that ability, like when someone pokes around in their car and discovers references to a new unannounced model, and then Tesla reaches in, force downgrades the vehicle to older software with no references, and then disables the ethernet port on the vehicle, and for a final fuck you disables its ability to ever get another update.

They'd never do that, except when they did do that.

[kccqzy]

The Twitter thread linked by the link posted GP actually contained a reasonable explanation of why that happened. https://x.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939644621545473

[SoftTalker]

It sounds like, in this case, the updates clobbered the ssh authorized keys (or equivalent in their system) and so now they cannot access the cars remotely. So they are going to have to go into the shop and have the authorized keys restored.