A Sydney man homewner filmed the moment a neighbour allegedly keyed his Tesla, and the confrontation that unfolded afterwards.
Garnet Mae, a 52-year-old director from McMahon’s Point, on Sydney’s lower North Shore, got the footage from the inbuilt security cameras in his Tesla.
It appeared to show a neighbour visiting the car in the dead of night and dragging a key down the side of it.
Mr Mae later confronted the man and filmed the interaction. ‘It looks like you keyed my car,’ he can be heard saying in the video of the Tuesday incident.
‘My red Tesla. You didn’t realise, but the car films. It makes a video, so you keying my car, I have video evidence of you keying my car.’
‘I was just walking past it,’ the man replied.
But Mr Mae continued to confront the alleged keyer: ‘No – you can see that you’re deliberately hitting the car with keys.’
He offered the man the option of paying $800 for the damage upfront, warning that he would otherwise call the police and ‘you’ll be charged with malicious damage’.
The video appeared to show his neighbour visiting the car in the dead of night and dragging a key down the side of it
Mr Mae later confronted the man and filmed the interaction
Mr Mae then filmed himself walking away with what appeared to be a ream of cash.
‘$800 from the neighbour who scratched my Tesla,’ he said.
Speaking to Daily Mail Australia on Wednesday, Mr Mae gave some background to the alleged incident.
He had parked his Tesla in the visitor’s car park of a unit complex near his home in McMahon’s Point when it was allegedly keyed.
Parking was hard to find on his street and a resident of the complex had previously told him he was free to use the car park.
‘We woke up the next day and my ex-partner is like the car’s been keyed,’ he said.
He was shocked when he looked at the car’s security camera footage from the night before.
‘I was a bit horrified and surprised that an elderly gentleman would key my car, but given my recent interactions with neighbours it could have been any number of people who keyed my car.’
He asked the neighbour to sign this note following the alleged incident
He returned to the unit complex and after knocking on some doors was able to track down the alleged vandal.
He explained that he had asked for the $800 to cover the insurance excess, and hadn’t reported the alleged culprit to police.
It comes amid a spate of vandalism targeting the $100,000-plus electric vehicles.
Motoring expert James Ward has called Tesla the most polarising brand in Australia.
‘People have this really weird love-hate relationship with the brand,’ Mr Ward told Daily Mail Australia.
‘You see almost this cultish behavior from these diehard fans who will not hear a bad word said about it.
‘But then you have others who feel a bit threatened and think, “You’re not going to take away my Diesel ute or my V8 Commodore,” or whatever it is.’
But Mr Ward said the vandalism was not necessarily driven by a dislike of electric cars, claiming that even though there were some ‘pretty flash looking electric BMWs and Mercedes’, he had only ever heard of people keying Teslas.
It’s a disturbing trend that strikes fear into the heart of any Tesla owner: returning to their beloved vehicle to discover someone has scored a key across its sleek body work
He likened owning a Tesla to the early days of Apple MacBook computers, when many people believed you used an ‘Apple Mac or you were nothing’ – generating a sense of inferiority among those less fortunate.
He also suggested that vandals could be driven by an irrational hatred of Tesla’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk.
‘No other brand on the road polarises as much as Tesla, and I think there is a lot of it being the Elon Musk factor given he is a very opinionated, very right-leaning personality,’ Mr Ward said.
As a result, Mr Ward said many people saw Musk’s ‘cars as a target’.
‘It’s the idea that you are scratching a Tesla because you don’t like Elon Musk through some kind of weird psychological association,’ he added.
Beyond that, Mr Ward said people were often triggered by spite and jealousy.
‘There is definitely an element of jealousy there and you used to see it where, if you had a Mazda and a Mercedes parked side by side, the Mercedes would get keyed – not the Mazda,’ he said.
‘Especially where times are a bit tough, people think, “You will not flaunt wealth in front of me. I’ll show you.”‘
A spate of vandalism incidents involving the Elon Musk-designed electric vehicles have made headlines across Australia in recent months for one simple reason: the unwitting culprits have been caught in the act
In another incident, Mr Mae and his 63-year-old neighbour were filmed tussling over a circular
But in the case of Mr Mae’s Tesla, the alleged vandal seems to have been motivated by a simple desire to protect a visitor’s car park.
Mr Mae has had trouble with Sydney neighbours in the past.
He made headlines last December after trying to help his brother resolve a boundary dispute in Redfern.
Tensions escalated when the elderly neighbor allegedly set up a temporary fence, blocking access to Mr Mae’s brother’s bin.
Mr Mae then removed the wire fencing and began chopping a rosebush on his property with his circular saw.
Footage showed the neighbour approaching Mr Mae before yelling ‘I will take your f***ing head off’ and allegedly grabbing the electric saw off him.
Mr Mae stayed calm as the neighbour allegedly pushed him around the outside space and struggled for the saw.
