COLORADO SPRINGS — Within hours of a Tesla Cybertruck exploding outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day, police were able to track the route of the vehicle from Colorado to Nevada, with each stop along the way.
That same night, KOAA broke the news that Colorado Springs resident and active-duty soldier Matthew Liveslberger was the perpetrator of the blast, with law enforcement able to confirm his identity in part due to Tesla surveillance along his route.
Livelsberger shot himself in the head just as he detonated his makeshift fuel and fireworks bomb inside the truck.
Investigators knew the Cybertruck was rented in Denver on Dec. 28 through the Turo app, tracking Livelsberger to a Tesla Supercharger in Monument, Colo. on Dec. 30.
Over the next couple of days, Livelsberger was tracked through Trinidad, Colo., and throughout New Mexico and Arizona, every stop at a Tesla supercharger station immediately known.
“I have to thank Elon Musk specifically, he gave us quite a bit of additional information,” said Sheriff Kevin McMahill of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) in a press conference hours after the incident.
“Being able to capture all of the video from the Tesla charging stations across the country. And they were sent, he sent that directly to us, so I appreciate his help on that.”
Some might expect an investigation across multiple state lines to take days or even weeks, but LVMPD and federal partners pieced together Livelsberger’s journey in remarkably fast fashion.
When asked how authorities were able to track the vehicle through Tesla’s network so specifically, Sheriff McMahill admitted he wasn’t exactly sure how to answer the question.
“I know that there's some capability by being able to determine that the car is connected to the charger,” he said.
On Jan. 3, two days after the explosion, LVMPD publicly released a video of Livelsberger at a Tesla supercharger station in Kingman, Ariz. to illustrate how they were able to piece together his journey and positively identify him.
In the video, which appears to be from the Cybertruck’s camera system and not the supercharger station itself, Livelsberger can be seen walking around the vehicle with a headlamp, putting on a jacket, and brushing debris from the vehicle.
“The whole Tesla senior team is investigating this matter right now,” Elon Musk wrote on X in the hours after the explosion. Musk owns both X and Tesla.
LVMPD Sheriff McMahill said Musk dispatched a Tesla team immediately to Las Vegas and indicated they were looking to pull video from cameras inside the Cybertruck before the explosion, but it’s unknown if they’ve been successful in that effort. They were able to access other data.
“There are various components in there that were retrieved,” said LVMPD Assistant Sheriff Dori Koren. “The SDMI card. That was where we got the data to be able to determine that it was not in self-driving mode. However, Tesla did provide and helped our team be able to recover the thumb drive that records other types of data to include video by the Tesla in Kingman, Arizona.”
The speed with which investigators were able to access, track, and view Livelsberger’s movements brings forth the debate about the right to privacy weighed against public safety.
As the LVMPD investigation was detailed, some social media users took note of the lack of privacy and data protection.
“So wait? If you drive a Tesla, you are being recorded the entire time you are in the vehicle?
This seems really creepy and Big Brother-type behavior,” wrote X user William Buecker.
Another user on X, Laurel Morrissey, wrote “this is so wild. so yes, you're being recorded and footage stored somewhere. and every time you stop at a tesla battery charging station it's recorded.”
Rodney Gullatte, Jr., a certified ethical hacker and board member of the National Cybersecurity Center in Colorado Springs, said Tesla’s privacy policy is shorter and easier to understand than other companies.
“One of the things in the privacy policy, it states that if you go to a supercharger station, that is a trackable event. That gets sent to them,” said Gullatte.
“As far as the privacy policy, a lot of that stuff says that the information, the sentry system, that's a camera system, the inside dash camera system. That information gets saved inside the truck or inside your Tesla vehicle. It doesn't go out to Tesla servers at all. So that's why [Musk] had to send engineers out to the crime scene to pull that out of the truck physically, because that information doesn't get sent to them remotely,” Gullatte added.
Gullatte cautioned privacy and data concerns in this day and age shouldn’t be solely focused on just one company like Tesla.
“You’re always being tracked,” he said.
“If you have a smartphone, if you're on Facebook right now, you know any social media system, you have given up your privacy for convenience,” said Gullate. “You've given up your privacy for entertainment. You've given up your privacy for safety. You need to read these contracts.”
As for Tesla drivers themselves, several at the supercharger station in Trinidad, Colo. weren’t aware they were being recorded and tracked when using it. But they didn’t seem to care.
Maureen Baca and her husband were charging their Tesla in Trinidad en route to their home in Albuquerque. It’s the same location where Matthew Livelsberger stopped on his way to Las Vegas.
“I’ve given up being worried about [privacy] a long time ago. It just goes with where we are. Do I like it? It’s just a reality,” said Baca.
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Matthew Livelsberger: The Colorado Springs Man Found Inside The Las Vegas Cybertruck
Residents living in an east Colorado Springs townhome complex shared their disbelief after learning one of their neighbors was suspected of detonating explosives inside a Cybertruck in Las Vegas on New Year's Day.
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