Future shocks crims
Teen crooks learn a hard lesson: ‘Don’t mess with Teslas’
IN scenes reminiscent of hit TV show Knight Rider, three youths have been sprung allegedly breaking into cars by a vehicle’s hi-tech security.
A Tesla equipped with Sentry Mode, a sophisticated alarm system that can record movement, caught a break and enter on tape in Ashmore on January 19.
The owners of the Tesla were visiting family and parked in the driveway.
The vision shows the robbers opening the door to the Tesla and then going into the garage, where they can be seen rummaging through two other cars.
The headlights from the car illuminate the garage clearly, showing the faces of the thieves as they casually go about the robbery while smoking cigarettes.
It wasn’t until the car’s owner came out that they hightailed it from the garage with more than $1000 cash and other property.
Two boys aged 16 and a 15year-old boy have been charged with two counts of enter premises and one count of burglary.
A fourth teenager, a 16year-old girl, has been charged with receiving tainted property.
The Tesla owner Kiara Sullivan said one person came and scouted the car first, before the others returned and tried to steal it.
“There’s two sets of keys, the keys in my husband’s pocket, he must have been too close to the car and it was unlocked,” she said.
“Because of that the first guy was able to grab my keys and passed them to the others around the corner, because when you see them drive up they already had my keys.
“They had no idea they were being filmed … every time they walked past the front of the car the headlights turn on, that’s what lit them up.
“You’d think that would have given them an idea that they were being recorded, but no.”
She said they tried to steal the car, but couldn’t work out the complicated system.
“We didn’t know they were in there. We came out to go home … the door was open, and we saw there was someone in the driver’s seat and then someone in the back going through the car.
“They had gone through the garage and stolen cash and other things. They couldn’t steal the car because we have a PIN number on it, you need to have the keys and put in the pin to press drive. They were playing with the screen trying to work out how to make it go.”
Mrs Sullivan said the recording made it easy for police.
“We gave police the footage and that was the evidence needed to arrest them,” she said. “We didn’t know it was recording, but it basically chooses when to record based on what activity is going on around it.
“It’s called Sentry Mode … at the shops, it will start recording if someone goes up next to it in case they hit it with a shopping trolley. Don’t mess with Teslas.”
The smart technology is reminiscent of the car in 1980s US series Knight Rider. The car, called KITT, could talk to its driver, played by David Hasselhoff.