Organized crews stole trailers of Tesla car and home batteries straight off loading docks at the company’s Nevada facilities at least 11 times since last December, according to Storey County sheriff’s records. Nine of those suspected cargo thefts happened in January alone. The hauls ran into the millions: two of the earliest trailers each carried more than $475,000 in Powerwall 3 home battery systems, and investigators recovered them empty roughly 500 miles away in Southern California.

“It’s an epidemic right now,” Storey County Sheriff’s Detective Sam Hatley told reporters. The thefts were not smash-and-grab jobs at a rest stop. They were what the freight industry calls strategic theft: planned operations that exploit gaps in a company’s shipping security. The thieves used forged commercial driver’s licenses, posed as legitimate carriers, and took advantage of loose vetting by the freight brokers who move Tesla’s products. I have spent years documenting Tesla’s energy division, and the detail that lands hardest here is the irony. The company that writes some of the most advanced autonomous-driving software on the road could not reliably verify a trucker’s identity at its own gate.

The records were obtained through public-records requests and first reported by WIRED, which examined emergency dispatch logs and sheriff’s office files tied to Tesla’s Gigafactory Nevada.

Thieves Exploited Tesla’s Loading Docks for Two Straight Months

The thefts targeted full semi-trailers of finished product before they ever reached customers. The first recent case, in December, involved two trailers of Powerwall 3 units taken off Tesla property by what sheriff’s reports called a dodgy logistics carrier. Over the following four days, two more trailers, each holding about $500,000 in Powerwalls, were gone.

GPS tracking is the only reason any of it came back. One of those trailers turned up empty. The other was found fully loaded at a gas station 18 miles from the factory, where detectives placed their own tracking device and told Tesla the plan was to catch the thieves when they returned. Tesla employees drove out and hauled the trailer away anyway, getting briefly pulled over by confused deputies in the process. Hatley declined to comment on that mishap. Investigators tied one of the same operations to battery recycler Redwood Materials, the Nevada firm that recycles spent EV battery packs.

Not every crew got away clean. Two trailers stolen the following week still had their built-in GPS trackers running, and both were found nearby with cargo untouched. On January 30, police arrested three suspects driving off with one of those trailers, which carried a police tracker. Prosecutors charged Arashdeep Singh, Deepindeer Singh, and Harman Pal Singh, all in their twenties and from Northern California, with felony possession of stolen property. Authorities allege the men traveled from California using a forged commercial driver’s license in someone else’s name. Their cases are set for trial in October.

A January Trailer of 123 Powerwalls Bound for Hayward Never Arrived

One of the cases shows how thin the security chain was. On January 19, a trailer carrying 123 Powerwalls left the factory bound for a Tesla facility in Hayward, California, and never made it. Sheriff’s reports state the semitruck and the company whose driver came to collect the trailer were not licensed for interstate operations. A freight broker had handed the contract to an illegitimate carrier.

That Hayward destination is worth pausing on. The facility is Tesla’s primary intake hub for residential Powerwall batteries, and it is the same site where a former Tesla Energy regional manager alleged she was fired after warning that the warehouse was dangerously overcrowded with high-voltage lithium-ion cells, a lawsuit EVXL covered in February. Powerwall logistics, on both ends of the route, keep producing problems.

There is a built-in deterrent on the product side. Tesla’s security team found some of the stolen Powerwalls listed for sale online and flagged them, and the units cannot be activated once marked as stolen. A buyer ends up with an expensive brick, which is why most of this hardware will never see a second owner.

Cargo Theft Has Doubled Nationally Since 2022

Tesla is a high-profile target, but it is far from alone. Transportation industry researchers estimated last year that shipping thefts in the US roughly doubled from 2022 to 2024, costing companies nearly $18 million a day. Electronic components have been a frequent target, according to theft-prevention consultancy Verisk CargoNet. What worries law enforcement most is the rise of strategic thefts, the planned variety Tesla has been dealing with, rather than opportunists grabbing goods from an unattended trailer.

WIRED learned of the Tesla incidents by requesting dispatch records from Storey County, where the battery factory employs an estimated 12,000 people, making it by far the area’s largest employer. A Tesla associate manager told investigators that some of the early thefts stemmed from failing to follow basic security protocols. The company has since tightened procedures, including verifying driver identity at the factory gate. “It’s definitely helping,” Hatley said, adding that thefts are happening but not as prolifically.

Investigators are tracking 17 alleged cargo thefts this year involving Tesla and other Storey County businesses, though Hatley declined to say how many involved the carmaker specifically. He called even that figure a likely undercount, because companies are often reluctant to disclose that their products were stolen. Lawmakers have started to respond. In May, the US House passed a bipartisan bill to make it easier to prosecute retail and cargo theft and improve coordination between agencies. It now awaits action in the Senate, where Nevada Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, whose state hosts the factory taking the hits, plans to fight for its passage.

EVXL’s Take

The headline writes itself, and it should sting in Palo Alto. A company that asks regulators and the public to trust its cars to drive themselves spent two months unable to confirm whether the man hitching up a half-million-dollar trailer was who he claimed to be. That is not a sophisticated-criminal story. It is a basic-controls story, and the sheriff’s own records say so: a Tesla manager admitted the early thefts came down to skipping security steps that any logistics operation should treat as routine.

Here is the part that should bother Tesla owners and shareholders more than the thefts themselves. The energy division is the business keeping Tesla’s numbers afloat while car sales sag. We have tracked that shift for over a year: Powerwall and Megapack revenue has become the growth engine, the bright spot every quarter. And the operational discipline around that crown-jewel product line keeps looking shaky. First a Powerwall 2 fire recall that landed in the US two months after Australia got the same warning. Then a lawsuit alleging the Hayward intake hub was packed past safe limits. Now trucks of finished Powerwalls walking out the factory gate on forged paperwork. Different failure modes, same theme: the part of Tesla that actually pays the bills is not being run with the rigor its importance demands.

Tesla deserves some credit for the product-side lockout. A stolen Powerwall that bricks itself is genuinely good design, and it is why most of this hardware will never see a second owner. But a deterrent that kicks in after the theft is not a substitute for not getting robbed eleven times in two months. The fix here is not exotic. It is gate discipline, carrier vetting, and broker accountability, the unglamorous work Amazon already does with daily carrier screening. Watch the Singh defendants’ October trial and the Senate’s handling of the cargo-theft bill for whether this becomes an industry reckoning or just an embarrassing quarter for the company that builds the smartest batteries on the market and guards them the worst.

Source: WIRED.

EVXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.