Tennis star and Tesla owner Nick Kyrgios used the automaker’s mobile app to help police track down his Model X, which was stolen from his home at gunpoint.
If you want to steal a car, a Tesla vehicle might not be your best choice.
According to a report from the Highway Loss Data Institute, Tesla vehicles are about 90% less likely to be stolen than the average car. They are equipped with always-on GPS and connectivity that make them easy to track, and they are unlocked via a phone app or key fob.
So you can steal them, but keeping them after you do is the harder part, and a thief in Australia found that out recently when he tried to steal Kyrgios’s Tesla Model X.
According to court documents obtained by The Guardian, a masked man showed up to Kyrgios’s home in Canberra, Australia on Monday. Kyrgios’s mother answered the door, and the man asked for the keys to the Model X at gunpoint. The man even reportedly requested for her to show him how to use the Model X.
She saw an opportunity to run inside the house, which she did, and it gave Kyrgios a chance to call the police as the thief was leaving.
As he was informing the police of the situation, the tennis star was able to track his car using the Tesla mobile app. Furthermore, he was even able to even limit the speed of his car to 80 km/h using the app.
Those features enabled the police to quickly track down the car and engage it in a chase, but they had to give up when it was deemed too dangerous as the thief entered a school zone.
After stopping the chase, they kept tracking the car using the Tesla app and eventually saw that it stopped in Ainslie, an inner-north suburb. They approached the vehicle, and the thief didn’t surrender until he was tased.
It’s a good example of how Tesla’s high level of connectivity can be very useful in those situations.