A Sydney court has convicted a businessman of 30 domestic violence charges in a case that shows how connected car remote access can be turned against the driver. Police documents tendered at Parramatta local court described Enrico Pucci taking command of his former partner’s Tesla through its app while she still drove the car, cutting its speed, working the locks and forcing cabin temperatures between extremes.
Court records date her loss of control to November 1, 2025, when a parental control profile she could not see or remove appeared on the dashboard. From then on the profile could dictate speed, climate, locks and curfew hours, effectively deciding when the car was allowed on the road. Over the following week Pucci flipped the cabin between very cold and very hot and engaged Valet Mode, capping the car at 40 km/h in traffic. He also tried seven times to disconnect the vehicle from its charger through the app. Police wrote that he was the only person holding app access while the victim had no control of her own car.
The setup dated back to the relationship: the car was registered in Pucci’s name after he offered to help Stacey with the technology. That digital control survived the breakup, and she kept none. Judge Peter Feather sentenced him to two years and three months with a 15-month non-parole period after guilty pleas covering stalking and intimidation, assault, choking and using a carriage service to menace or harass.
Pucci is appealing and returns to court in late October, adding a real-world case to long-running questions about who keeps control of a connected vehicle’s digital functions when a relationship ends.
