If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area and own a Tesla, police may be coming for your Tesla as a potential crime witness & may even tow it!

As discussed in the San Francisco Chronicle (Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla – and they might tow it, written by Rachel Swan and available here), a Canadian tourist was visiting Oakland, California recently when he had to talk someone out of taking his Tesla from a hotel parking lot.

This was no thief. It was the Oakland Police Department. Turns out, the Tesla may have witnessed a homicide.

In Oakland and beyond, police called to crime scenes are increasingly looking for more than shell casings and fingerprints. They’re scanning for Teslas parked nearby, hoping their unique outward-facing cameras captured key evidence. And, the Chronicle has found, they’re even resorting to obtaining warrants to tow the cars to ensure they don’t lose the video.

The trend offers a window into how mass surveillance — the expansion of cameras as well as license-plate scanners, security doorbells and precise cellphone tracking — is changing crime-fighting. While few cars have camera systems similar to Teslas, that could change rapidly, especially as the technology in vehicles continues to improve.

“We have all these mobile video devices floating around,” said Sgt. Ben Therriault, president of the Richmond Police Officers Association.

Therriault said he and other officers now frequently seek video from bystander Teslas, and usually get the owners’ consent to download it without having to serve a warrant. Still, he said, tows are sometimes necessary, if police can’t locate a Tesla owner and need the video “to pursue all leads.”

In at least three instances in July and August, Oakland police sought to tow a Tesla into evidence to obtain — via a second court order — its stored video. Officers cited the cars’ “Sentry Mode” feature, a system of cameras and sensors that records noise and movement around the vehicle when it is empty and locked, storing it in a USB drive in the glove box.

The case involving the Canadian tourist happened July 1 outside the La Quinta Inn near the Oakland airport. When officers arrived at the parking lot shortly after midnight, they found a man in an RV suffering from gunshot and stab wounds. He was later pronounced dead at Highland Hospital.

Officers also noticed a gray Tesla parked in the stall opposite the RV.

“I know that Tesla vehicles contain external surveillance cameras in order to protect their drivers from theft and/or liability in accidents,” officer Kevin Godchaux wrote in the search warrant affidavit obtained by the Chronicle, noting that the vehicle was perfectly positioned to document what happened.

While there’s no guarantee that a Tesla will record a crime that occurs near it, police who view Teslas as rolling surveillance security cameras aren’t taking chances.

So, police may be coming for your Tesla as a potential crime witness. If a Tesla can disprove claims of a hit and run or identify someone who keyed the car for the owner, I guess it’s not too much to ask to have it help fight crimes against other people too!

Hat tip to Eric De Grasse of Luminative Media for the heads up on the story. Check out his post here, which also discusses how cops are beginning to use Teslas as cop cars!

So, what do you think? Are you surprised that police may be coming for your Tesla as a potential crime witness? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using GPT-4o’s Image Creator Powered by DALL-E, using the term “robot lawyer watching a Tesla being connected to a tow truck”.

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