Jay Yarow, an executive editor at CNBC, was quite perplexed when his crashed and totaled Model X, situated in the US, unexpectedly reappeared in Ukraine. He stumbled upon this discovery when the new driver was using Jay's Spotify account to listen to music by Drake. This incident is particularly intriguing given the ongoing severe conflict in the same country.
From Yahoo News:
As CNBC notes in its reporting on the strange incident, Yarow totaled the car at the end of 2022 and, like many people whose cars have crashed, sold it for parts. He only discovered that it was cruising around war-torn Ukraine after he began getting notifications to the Tesla app, which he still had downloaded on his phone.
In interviews, security experts and parts salespeople told the business news outlet that internet-connected cars — by no means exclusive to Tesla — can indeed pose security risks for their former owners, even if the car in question is totaled like Yarow's.
CNBC found that its executive editor had sold the totaled Model X to a junkyard in New Jersey that works with the online auction site Copart, which specializes in selling "salvage titles" issues when wrecked cars are determined by insurance to be a total loss. It's not uncommon, it turns out, for those vehicles to ultimately end up getting fixed up and shipped to other countries — as Carfax Europe noted in a 2021 report on salve title imports, more than 90 percent of the cars imported into Ukraine have salvage titles.
Although neither the site nor the junkyard confirmed that it was sold to someone in Europe or Ukraine, experts who spoke to CNBC said it would have been pretty simple for the car to end up there.
"Cars go to the repair shop or junkyard," Mike Dunne, a former General Motors executive who now runs the car consulting firm ZoZoGo, told the outlet. He added that such cars "then find their way to a second market and then are suddenly being shipped overseas."
Yarrow spilled the beans that Tesla supposedly shot him an email, telling him to unhook his account from the car. Whether he actually did what Tesla asked isn't completely clear, but one thing's for sure—he didn't unplug his Spotify.
It's kinda eerie to imagine your old ride, complete with all of your personal info, cruising around a whole different country, thousands of miles from home.
