A Tesla Model S police car in Fremont, California, reportedly ran low on power last week during the pursuit of a suspect vehicle, forcing officers to abandon the chase in search of a place to charge the car.
The last thing a police officer trying to chase down a suspect in a high-speed pursuit needs to see is a warning that their patrol car is running low on gas — or on battery juice.
But that’s how it went down Friday night in Fremont — in a Tesla no less. A Fremont police officer pursuing a suspect while driving the department’s Tesla Model S patrol car noticed it was running out of battery power.
During the pursuit of a “felony vehicle” that started in Fremont and reached peak speeds of about 120 miles per hour on the highway, the officer driving the Tesla radioed in to dispatch that he might not be able to continue the chase he was leading.
“I am down to six miles of battery on the Tesla so I may lose it here in a sec,” Officer Jesse Hartman said.
[…] “I’ve got to try to find a charging station for the Tesla so I can make it back to the city,” Hartman said over the radio.
He eventually found a charger in San Jose to juice up his car, said Geneva Bosques, a Fremont police department spokeswoman.
Apparently the Tesla had not been recharged after the previous shift before Hartman took it out for his swing shift Friday, so the battery level was lower than it normally would have been, Bosques said. She couldn’t provide details on why it wasn’t charged.[…]
Fremont’s police department made headlines earlier this year when this news organization broke the story that it would likely become the first police agency in the nation to roll out a Tesla as part of its patrol fleet.
Apparently, the used 2014 Tesla Model S is part of a pilot program, to determine whether electric vehicles are suitable for police use on a larger scale. I guess that will be a “No”.
The department spent a tad over $61,000 to buy the car from Tesla in 2018 — which has its main manufacturing factory in Fremont — and spent over a year modifying the car to get it ready for police use, officially rolling it out in March.
The used Tesla cost approximately $20,000 more than a new Ford Explorer police vehicle that the department uses for its other patrol vehicles, though officials said they expect to save on fuel and maintenance costs over the long run with the Tesla. […]
East Bay Times
