The owner of a Tesla Model 3 in the United States has had the chip from the vehicle’s keycard implanted into her forearm so she can open the doors and drive the car by simply waving her arm near the car’s sensors.
The owner in question, who goes by the alias Amie DD on YouTube, is a software engineer and clearly no stranger to ‘body modification.’ In fact, she had an RFID tag inserted into her arm years ago to enable her to open the front door at her house and even send a smartphone’s browser directly to her personal website.
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Amie ordered a Tesla Model 3 and hoped that the electric sedan’s keycard would use RFID technology that would allow her to simply transfer the data from the card to her existing chip. This didn’t work out, so she instead decided to take the chip out of the EV’s keycard and put it straight into her arm.
To get the chip and antenna from the card, it was dropped into a container filled with acetone, dissolving the plastic of the card and leaving nothing but the chip and antenna that were encased in a biopolymer. She then headed to a body modification studio where the small chip was inserted into her arm. (BTW, if you’re not scared of blood, you should probably would look away for parts of the second video which details the ‘installation.’
Amie doesn’t actually mention in the videos how well the chip operates from her arm, but speaking with The Verge, confirmed that it does work, though her forearm must be about one-inch (25 mm) from the car’s center console before it will start up.