This is a follow up report to the story we shared last week when a Tesla Model 3 was rented on Turo and the guest took it to a body shop in California and was caught in the act offense by the owner in the process of replacing parts of the car.

Frank Valdez, the owner of this Tesla Model 3 shares more details about what really happened and how he caught the renter, and how his car is doing after this incident.

The irony of history is that the California police refused to help him with this case. Frank says he called the police only to hear he has to provide proof if things were actually stolen. Specifying all the details of the rental agreement, the police said “it was a civil matter”. So the police department could not send anyone for help in this situation (new videos below).

The lessee of this Tesla Model 3 acquired the car through ride-sharing service Turo saying he just wanted it for a short ride. But after picking up the vehicle, he drove straight to the body shop because the owner could tell by looking at the vehicle’s live GPS location using his Tesla mobile app.

Frank thought the tenant might be there for personal business or that he worked there. But when he discovered that his car was still parked at this local mechanical repair shop even after midnight, alarms started ringing in his head. Frank decided to visit the body shop at 1am and he didn’t find the car in the parking lot, it was in one of the repair shops there.

Frank decided to come back in the morning as the place was locked and barricaded at night. The next morning he visited that body shop again to find out what we had seen in the previous video, the original bumper was placed on a rack stand and a spare bumper was installed on his Tesla Model 3.

In another video update, Frank shows us that since his Tesla Model 3 returned to him from this body shop, some functions are not working properly on the car. For example, the central touchscreen user interface is unable to correctly display whether the front doors are open or not.

This means that something went wrong with the door sensors when this body mechanic removed the bumper and unclipped wires and reattached them. Since this was not done by anyone at Tesla or its certified technicians, there may be some messed up issues that need to be addressed.

However, according to the owner of this Tesla Model 3 Frank Valdez (@frankvidz / TikTok), both Tesla and Turo have been very cooperative in this matter. We had already shared Turo’s point of view which they asked us to publish in our previous report.

This car has already been fully inspected by Tesla and the owner is awaiting a report from the automaker. Turo, on the other hand, promised to cover all the costs and invoices that would result from this dismantling of the car by this Californian bodybuilder.

Stay tuned as we will post another update if any new developments come out of this story.

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