A Sydney woman's ex-partner controlled her Tesla from his phone. The car became a tool of abuse.

The Tesla app woke Stacey in the night with an alarm chirp from her own driveway. The next morning, a profile she had never added sat on her dashboard: a parental-control profile, attached to a phone number that was not hers.

The profile belonged to her ex-partner, Enrico Pucci, 50. From that moment on, the car she drove every day was a phone-controlled instrument that someone else could steer. Court records tendered at Parramatta Local Court show that between 6 and 12 November 2025, Pucci remotely alternated the cabin temperature between extremes and repeatedly enabled Valet Mode, a Tesla setting that caps the car's top speed at 40 km/h and disables most touchscreen controls. The setting is meant for parents of newly licensed teenagers. Pucci used it against a woman on a public road.

When Stacey confronted him, the response, recorded by police and tendered in court, ran: "You thought you'd get away with this. I am in your car. I am in your maps." On 28 August 2026, Judge Peter Feather sentenced Pucci to two years and three months in prison, with a 15-month non-parole period, after Pucci pleaded guilty the week before a hearing scheduled in August. The court heard 30 domestic-violence-related charges covering a four-year arc of conduct that began before the Tesla account existed and continued after the relationship ended. (The Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald)

The point of the case is the surface it names.

The Tesla app is a connected-car remote control. A Tesla account can lock and unlock the car, set climate, set speed limits, enable Valet Mode, and add driver profiles that each carry their own settings. A parental-control profile is a subset of those settings: speed caps, curfew hours, geofences, that one account can impose on another. Pucci had shared access to the car during the relationship, and that access did not end when the relationship did. He did not need to break into Stacey's account or exploit a software bug. He used the legitimate features the app is designed to give a primary account holder, against a driver who had no reason to know a second profile had been added to her own car.

The court materials describe Pucci as a "disgraced businessman" and trace a four-year pattern of coercion: forging fraudulent employment opportunities to keep Stacey financially dependent, then the remote-control phase that ended in the November 2025 police complaint. The Guardian's reporting, syndicated to outlets including News18, was published a week after the Sydney Morning Herald's earlier-allegations piece from December 2025.

The Parramatta conviction puts the connected-car surface itself on the record. Australian domestic-violence law has long treated shared digital accounts, including phone location, social media, and smart-home access, as coercive control. The Tesla case extends that category to a vehicle, and makes the mechanism explicit: not a hack, not a stolen password, but a feature a primary account holder can add, run, and weaponise after the relationship ends.

Two design questions follow the verdict, even though the court did not answer them. Tesla's parental-control flow has no on-screen alert when a new profile is added to a car, according to the court materials and reporting to date. Valet Mode's speed cap, originally a parent-of-a-teen feature, has no separate consent step for an adult driver who did not install it. Neither claim is sourced from Tesla, and the company has not been on the record in the visible reporting. They are questions the next case, or the next parliament, will answer.

The next hearing is not on a calendar. The next one is the next time a driver finds a profile on her own dashboard she did not add.