Lifestyle
Tesla Model S makes it home after dramatic transatlantic theft and rescue
When Soby of Evoto Rentals handed the key fob of one of the company’s Tesla Model S to a client that booked and paid for the electric car in advance, the businessman did not realize that it would mark the start of a long, arduous pursuit that would take the vehicle from the shipping yards of Montreal, Canada, to the shores of Italy. With its web of intrigue, near-misses, and a dramatic rescue, the story of Evoto Rentals’ stolen Model S could very well be one of the most compelling Tesla tales that has emerged to date.
A Booking Gone Wrong
It all started with a seemingly innocent booking. The client appeared to be a regular customer that merely wished to rent a Model S for a week. Everything seemed fine when the car was being booked. The deposit went through, and the entire rental fee was paid through a credit card. The customer drove off, and the electric car rental company thought that it was business as usual.
Things started to get strange. Monitoring the Model S through GPS, the businessman was a bit surprised to see the customer parking the premium electric car at a container packing company located on the outskirts of Montreal. The car stayed in the same location for 48 hours, and then the triangle representing the vehicle turned gray. With red flags all over the situation, the businessman tried emailing and calling the client, before realizing that the email address provided was a throwaway and the mobile number was from a burner phone.
The Escape
The businessman promptly reported the incident to the police, but the police explained that the circumstances were a civil matter since Evoto had rented the vehicle to the client. The police also commented that car thefts were low on their priority, so it might take a couple of months before a judge could look into the incident. Evoto Rentals would also be required to show proof that it attempted to contact the client after the rental period was over, such as physical letters sent by registered mail to the customer’s address.
The businessman opted to ring up the company’s lawyer and Tesla, both of whom advised against waiting as the vehicle could be shipped overseas. The electric car rental company hired a private investigator to scout the last known location of the vehicle, who was able to get some information about the nature of the cargo packing firm’s activities. Thanks to some help from Evoto’s lawyer, a search warrant from the police was secured, and the packing company’s site was searched.
The packing company claimed innocence, arguing that they believed the Tesla Model S was just another second-hand vehicle that was being shipped overseas. The company even provided camera footage to show the person who drove the electric car to the location. The contact information to the shipping company that was tasked to take the vehicles abroad was given as well. The shipping company was immediately called, but not long into the conversation, the businessman’s heart sank. The container that had Evoto’s Model S had just sailed towards the Middle East, and the vehicle was already in international waters.
The Rescue
With the pursuit of the Model S now extending far beyond Montreal, the EV rental company coordinated with the authorities to get INTERPOL involved. The ship was expected to have a layover in Italy, which presented an opportunity to retrieve the Tesla. This required some more paperwork to get the right authorities involved, as Evoto had to ask local police to make a request to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), who in turn created a request to INTERPOL, who, in turn, notified the Italian police to seize the ship when it arrived in the country. In a stroke of luck for Evoto, INTERPOL and the Italian police worked quickly, getting everything ready within a week.
The operation was a success, and the container carrying the stolen Model S was retrieved. As it turned out, the thieves cleverly declared that the container was filled with scrap metal so as not to arouse suspicion. When authorities opened the container, they did find scrap metal inside. But also inside the container was Evoto Rentals’ Tesla Model S, caked in dust, but miraculously undamaged from its harrowing ordeal.
Coming home
After more paperwork from the electric car rental company, the Tesla Model S was finally shipped home to Canada. Not including legal fees, Evoto ended up spending about US$21,000 to get their electric car back from Italy. Fortunately, most of the costs were covered by insurance. The stolen Model S finally made it home recently, where it was welcomed by the Evoto Rentals team.
While the theft of the vehicle was an emotionally draining ordeal, the businessman was nonetheless grateful for the help that Evoto received which made it possible to retrieve the stolen electric car. The EV rental company also gave particular thanks to Tesla for the electric car maker’s help, as well as the Model S’ technologies that made it easy to trace the vehicle’s location even after it left Montreal. The businessman learned a lesson too, as Evoto Rentals now conducts background checks for its clients before handing over a vehicle. A second GPS tracking system has also been installed on the company’s fleet of Model S, Model X, and Model 3.
Teslas are among the most challenging vehicles to steal. Fank Scafidi, director of public affairs at the National Insurance Crime Bureau, which crunched data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Crime Information Center, noted that 112 out of 115 stolen Teslas have been recovered from 2011 to May of 2018. “That’s about as good as it gets. I’m wondering if the thieves’ intellect might have been overwhelmed just sitting in a Tesla, much less figuring out how to operate it for any length of time,” he said. Apart from their tech, Teslas also have a suite of security features, including those that are introduced through a software update, such as Sentry Mode.
A former Vancouver police sergeant with ALS accounts his journey to become a patient for Elon Musk’s Neuralink wireless brain-computer interface technology.
“I’m texting you from my brain right now.” That was the first message Lee Marten sent after waking up from Neuralink surgery, five hours and one migraine after dozens of threads were stitched into his motor cortex.
Marten, a former Vancouver police sergeant, is one of the first Canadian ALS patients to receive Neuralink’s N1 brain implant, and the 26th recipient overall. He tells his story in a first-person account published by Maclean’s.
Marten recounts how he was a healthy, athletic Vancouver police sergeant until April 2022 when symptoms of muscle twitching and balance loss, were followed by a bad fall that broke his leg. He would eventually be diagnosed with ALS in early 2025 at the age of 47. ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a fatal neurodegenerative disease that progressively destroys the motor neurons controlling voluntary muscle movement, eventually taking away a patient’s ability to walk, speak, swallow and breathe. There’s no cure, and most patients live two to five years after diagnosis.
He describes the devastation of the diagnosis and how he began preparing for it while connecting with other young ALS patients through a WhatsApp group called Young Guns. Through that group he learned about a Neuralink clinical trial at Toronto Western Hospital and, after a roughly seven-month vetting process (physical assessments, psychiatric evaluation, a final interview with the Neuralink team), was accepted this past April as the trial’s 26th recipient and the first Canadian ALS patient to get the N1 implant. He recounts the May surgery in detail, including the robotic system that stitched 64 threads into his brain, and describes the app, Link, translating his neural signals into cursor control, which he was using within hours of waking up.
Marten walks through what daily use looks like, including weekly “brain training” exercises, a real-time neural-activity display, charging the implant via a beanie-mounted MagSafe charger, and using the implant for emailing, texting, social media, and gaming via a “Magic Box” that connects it to other devices. He also gives brief context on brain-computer interface history and quite candid about Musk, calling him “divisive” but saying he found him “easy to admire.
The piece closes on a heavier note, with Marten seeking to pursue medical assistance in dying as his symptoms progressed, noting that he’ll be able to communicate his final words to his family through Neuralink rather than facing a silent decline. He expresses hope the data from his case will help future ALS patients, even without a cure in his own lifetime.
Investor's Corner
Tesla Robotaxi gets a massive upgrade in Nevada
Nevada regulators just approved a massive expansion of Tesla’s robotaxi fleet across the entire county.
Tesla’s robotaxi footprint in Nevada just grew by roughly 500 times in a single regulatory vote.
The Nevada Transportation Authority approved Tesla’s full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit on Thursday, clearing the way for the company to deploy up to 5,000 driverless vehicles across Clark County over the next 12 months. The decision came during a four hour general session meeting that Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt watched live and reported on X, noting the vote replaces the interim order that had limited Tesla to just 10 robotaxis on a narrow stretch of the Las Vegas Strip.
EXCLUSIVE: Tesla has just officially received approval for its full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit in Nevada, clearing the way for Tesla to launch a paid public Robotaxi service in Las Vegas.
This officially allows @Tesla to deploy up to 5,000 robotaxis over the next… pic.twitter.com/DPs5UtUlrE
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) August 20, 2026
That earlier cap, covered here after it surfaced on August 13, came with restrictions that looked stricter than what Tesla runs in Austin: a 45 mph speed ceiling, no airport pickups, and a geofence confined to the Strip corridor. The new approval extends Tesla’s operating authority to all of Clark County, with room to request an even wider geofence across the state.
Tesla representatives at the meeting said they have no intention of putting 5,000 cars on the road right away. Commercial rides are expected to start within 30 days, pending vehicle inspections, insurance filings, and fare approval, the standard steps every robotaxi operator in Nevada has had to clear.
Tesla’s own Robotaxi account replied to the news with a short line, The golden future is upon us.
The timing lines up with Tesla’s broader robotaxi push this month. The company is preparing to open Cybercab rides to the public in Austin as soon as this month, and it opened a sweepstakes for riders to win a seat at the launch event. Tesla filed its original application for a 5,000 vehicle Nevada fleet back in June, a request regulators trimmed to 10 vehicles when they issued the interim order in July. Thursday’s vote effectively grants the number Tesla asked for from the start.
Zoox, the Amazon owned robotaxi operator, has run in Nevada since 2025 and was capped at 100 vehicles before Thursday’s decision. Tesla’s new ceiling puts it well ahead of that comparison on paper, though the company has said its actual fleet size will depend on how quickly FSD v15 rolls out, the software update executives have called the gateway to scaling unsupervised robotaxi operations nationwide.
Elon Musk
India tells Elon Musk’s X to “Follow the Law” in latest censorship update
Elon Musk says X now exposes government censorship, but India’s secrecy laws complicate that promise.
Elon Musk’s promise to make government censorship requests on X “clearly visible” is running into a wall in India, where the law forbids the very disclosure Musk is promising.
On August 15, Musk responded to an update from X’s open-source algorithm team by writing “Any censorship required by governments is now clearly visible.” The claim referred to a change X pushed two days earlier to its public xai-org/x-algorithm repository, which now includes a controversial filter written directly into the code. The filter suppresses posts from 665 accounts flagged by Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court from appearing in the For You feed of any viewer located in Brazil, unless the viewer already follows the account. The election tied to the filter is scheduled for October 4.
India’s government wasn’t as impressed, and responded on Monday that “X will have to follow the law of the land,” in response to Musk’s transparency push covered by the Times of India. The problem is structural rather than political. India issues content blocking orders under Section 69A of its IT Act, and Rule 16 of the accompanying 2009 Blocking Rules requires those orders to stay confidential. Publishing an India equivalent of the Brazil filter, naming specific accounts and citing specific government orders, would itself violate Indian law. Government use of Section 69A has grown from roughly 6,000 orders a year between 2018 and 2023 to about 24,300 in 2025, according to a Tech Times report.
The contrast puts Musk’s transparency pledge in an odd spot. It works largely as advertised in Brazil, where electoral law requires disclosure and X can point to specific account IDs and a specific court order in public code. It cannot work the same way in India, where the law requires the opposite. X users in India will keep seeing content disappear from search and their feeds without any public accounting of why, even as X tells the rest of the world that its censorship compliance is now inspectable.
This isn’t the first time X’s fights with a national government have shaped how the platform operates. Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered X to suspend the accounts of sitting lawmakers and journalists in 2024, a standoff that cost X its Brazilian revenue for months and froze Starlink’s local accounts before the investigation into Musk and X was closed in March with no evidence of wrongdoing found. X also sued California over a state law requiring moderation disclosures, arguing the mandate itself violated the First Amendment.
Whether India’s government pursues anything beyond a public statement remains to be seen. For now, the mismatch between what X can legally publish and what different governments legally allow it to publish is the real story behind Musk’s seven word claim.
Tesla Theater might be getting plenty more streaming platforms
Tesla Semi’s biggest adoptee gives an update on production timeline
