Connected Cars And Ownership

This week’s news about Russian Porsche owners having their cars remotely deactivated stayed with me longer than I expected. One moment, you have a €150,000 sports car. The next, you have a very heavy, very pretty paperweight—because someone, somewhere, pressed a button. It is a neat illustration of the direction we’re drifting toward with “connected” and “software-defined” cars.

In my recent article on robotaxis, I wrote that we’re stepping into a world where the economics make little sense, but the technological momentum is unstoppable. This Porsche episode is from the same story—just on the ownership side of the equation.

We used to have a clear divide. You owned your car, phone, TV. The state owned (or at least regulated) the roads, the networks, the infrastructure.

Now, the lines blur. You buy the hardware, but the “soul” of the product—the software, the control surface, the kill switch—belongs to someone else. And that someone often sits in a corporate office with little accountability and even less transparency.

With cloud-based controls, you don’t really own your car anymore. Porsche just demonstrated that—even if you pay top dollar, your property rights are conditional on the goodwill of a faraway server.

This isn’t just an annoyance. It chips away at the foundations of any healthy economy. Property rights were supposed to be simple: you buy a thing, it’s yours, and no algorithm can take it away.

Combine this erosion with the “winner-takes-all” logic of modern tech platforms, and you get a world where even wealth doesn’t buy independence. You’re still tethered to a digital leash owned by a megacorp—and you hope the person holding the leash had a good morning and a stable internet connection.

Robotaxis show us what happens when mobility becomes fully automated but economically fragile. The Porsche case shows us what happens when ownership becomes fully digital but legally fragile.

Two sides of the same shift.

And both raise the same question: What does “ownership” mean in an automated, connected world—when the “wires” run not to your garage, but to someone else’s cloud?