Someone in Europe opened the garage of a US Tesla owner over Model 3 VIN number mismatch

Tesla mismatched the VIN numbers of one American and one European Model 3, leading to quite the stressful realization that someone else can open your garage door from another continent for the US Tesla owner. When his partner reported that the car was acting weird, opening the trunk and frunk doors on its own, or blasting the A/C, and doing it repeatedly, one Robert Quattlebaum escalated to Tesla's customer service and got the following answer:

I’m sorry, Mr. Quattlebaum, but it appears that one of our employees in Europe entered the wrong VIN when updating the system about the sale of another vehicle. The wrong VIN they entered was the VIN for your vehicle.

For the Model 3 owner, this explained why he found the garage door opened without any memory of opening it, or why the car all of a sudden disappeared from his account when a relative took it to run errands, prompting him to call Tesla.

"We are going to move the vehicle back over to your account and open an investigation into how this happened," added the Tesla rep after escalating to their manager to resolve the issue. Apparently, an European customer bought a second-hand vehicle from Tesla and upon registering it to their account, the VIN number that the car carried was actually the one of the Model 3 sold in the US.

As a reminder, registering a vehicle in the Tesla app allows you not only to open doors and windows or use the horn, but also to start the vehicle, open linked garage doors, and see the vehicle location at all times.

The person "in Europe" who opened the trunk and garage, or started the A/C, was probably in no less of a state of confusion as to why their own car was not responding to those same commands, too, which would explain why they opened the frunk or blasted the air conditioner multiple times.

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