Leave the World Behind has been causing a stir following its Netflix premiere. One scene in particular is drawing comparisons to real life, and even disgruntling Elon Musk: the Tesla scene.
Leave the World Behind is a psychological thriller based on the book of the same name by Rumaan Alam. It follows the Sanford family, who are staying in Long Beach on vacation with the owners of their rental Airbnb when they realize the country is in crisis. The film does an excellent job of building suspense and uneasiness by keeping audiences in the dark about what’s happening. However, it doesn’t take long to realize that technology is at the center of the catastrophe. From the onset, there are hints that the United States is experiencing a cyber-attack that caused widespread blackouts.
The film really dives into what would happen if an enemy managed to access, control, and disrupt all the current technology in America. It’s actually quite scary to realize how reliant the United States is on technology and how nearly every industry is susceptible to cyber-attacks. Aircraft, ships, satellites—they could all be hijacked by hackers. Leave the World Behind illustrates this threat by showing an oil tanker running ashore on a beachfront filled with tourists and planes nose-diving from the sky. However, one of the most chilling scenes is when the hackers gain access to a technology we’re just becoming familiar with: self-driving Teslas.
What happens to the Teslas in Leave the World Behind?
In Leave the World Behind, the characters are often clueless about how to survive as the catastrophe unfolds. It doesn’t take long for the Sanfords to get the bright idea to leave their Long Beach rental and pile in the car, seemingly believing they can actually outdrive whatever threat they’re facing. As they make their way to the highway, they’re soon stopped by what initially appears to be a traffic jam. What’s eerie, though, is that the cars are completely stagnant, and all appear to be the same model.
After surveying the situation, Amanda (Julia Roberts) decides to get out and investigate. As she walks among the cars, she sees that most of them are damaged, seemingly having crashed into one another. She goes up to the windows in hopes of talking to the drivers, but as she gets closer, she realizes there are no drivers. These are all brand-new self-driving Teslas, and they drove themselves to the highway.
With horror, she realizes that the Teslas were hacked and more may very well be on their way to clog the highways. Sure enough, another Tesla starts coming down the road, driving straight for where her family’s car is parked. Fortunately, she manages to sprint to the car and maneuver it out of the Tesla’s path. The Tesla never changes course, crashing full force into the growing pile-up. Soon, Amanda finds herself dodging Teslas left and right while navigating back to the rental. Meanwhile, the camera pans out to show that the traffic jam goes on for miles and miles, with the Teslas having clogged up the highways and caused mass pile-ups as far as the eye can see.
How plausible is the Tesla scene?
In a relatively eerie turn of events, just days after Leave the World Behind was released, two million Teslas were recalled for an autopilot defect, though the recall was unrelated to any hacking. Although Musk responded to the film by defending his cars, he has admitted in the past that a wide scale hack of Tesla is a concern. He even once posited a scenario in which someone hacks the self-driving Teslas and has them all go to Rhode Island.
Meanwhile, Teslas have proven to be hackable, though all these hackers were fortunately working with the company to help fix vulnerabilities. There was also more variation in what these hackers could do. Some of the hackers could gain access to the drivers’ personal information or even mess with the lights and horns, but couldn’t actually start, drive, and direct the car where to go. However, at least one hack was found on the Tesla Model 3 and Y cars that did allow hackers to turn on and drive the car by tricking it into thinking its owner was nearby.
So, yes, it is very possible to hack into Teslas. It’s difficult to say if gaining access to every Tesla to the extent of driving them remotely would be possible. A hacker gaining driving abilities for a handful of Teslas could already be disastrous. An enemy hacking into two million Teslas would be a worst-case scenario. Even if there’s just the tiniest remote possibility that this could happen—it’s still a possibility.
Leave the World Behind warns viewers that we don’t know a whole lot about new technology, and others might be able to use it against us in ways we didn’t even consider before.
(featured image: Netflix)
