Gimme $1 Million: Tesla Owner Sues Man Who Keyed His Car

A man in suing the vandal who keyed his Tesla for $1 million dollars. That might sound ridiculous considering fixing the paint on the American car won’t cost nearly that much. In fact, he could buy a small fleet of Teslas with that money.

Ford issues yet another safety recall, this time for a crazy transmission fault.

The keying incident was recorded by the Tesla Model X’s onboard cameras as the EV was parked at the DFW airport garage in North Texas. That’s how the owner even knew who did the damage. Admittedly, we’ve wanted to know that sort of thing when people have damaged our parked rides in the past.

But the dollar amount of the lawsuit seems a little over the top. The victim’s attorney sat down with CBS Texas and explained it’s not about the money, it’s about sending a message to people who think they can just vandalize Teslas without consequence.

We can understand where the guy’s coming from. After all, there are so many Tesla vandalism stories right now, we’ve never seen anything like it. If it became clear the vandals could be sued into oblivion, that might stop the runaway trend in its tracks.

The victim has obscured his identity apparently because he’s received threats after his story went viral recently. Again, we’ve never seen anything like this before. We’re not Tesla fans at all, but attacking the cars when you see them parked, then threatening owners for sharing videos of the attacks is just unhinged.

We also have to agree with the victim’s attorney who said allowing people to just wantonly vandalize vehicles based on their perception of the owner’s political leanings pushes us toward the brink of anarchy. A civil society doesn’t involve that sort of behavior.

When we first saw how much the Tesla owner was suing the vandal for, we thought it was just a money grab. But we can see why he wants to send a clear message that this kind of intimidation shouldn’t be tolerated to any degree.

What do you think? Has the Tesla owner and his attorney gone too far? Or is this a necessary move to stop the vandalism trend?

Image via CBS Texas/YouTube