Image: Scott McKay
Tesla owners have been fined by traffic police for some weird shenanigans, but Calgary, Alberta-based resident Scott McKay was hit with a $373 ticket for speeding, when a Calgary police officer pulled him over after estimating he was going 120 km/h in an 80 km/h zone — reports Livewire Calgary.
Issuing speeding tickets based on speed estimates aren’t a rare occurrence for traffic police. In fact, Sgt. John Hebert of the Calgary Police Traffic Section said that officers make speed estimates on a regular basis.
However, McKay, who has been driving his Tesla for a while, believed he had a good idea of his own estimated speed and that he couldn’t have been going 120 km/h, even after speeding up to merge into traffic.
This is where McKay’s subscription to TeslaFi played its role.
TeslaFi is a subscription-based data app that pulls diagnostic information from a Tesla at 30-second intervals and displays it to the user. The diagnostic information contains everything from heading and location (according to GPS) to speed.
Image: Scott McKay
Upon reviewing his TeslaFi data from around the time the ticket was issued, McKay discovered that his Tesla never went over 96.6 km/h and had an average speed of 31 km/h during that window of time.
Unfortunately, vehicle data, as confirmed by TeslaFi, isn’t court-certified, meaning that its effectiveness as evidence in a court of law remains unverified, said the company.
That isn’t enough to deter McKay, however, who plans on using the on-board data from his Tesla in court to fight the ticket. It’s definitely worth a try for him, especially since the ticket comes with four demerits and a possible hike in his insurance premiums.
“The Crown has to prove I was doing 120 so I don’t know how he’s going to be able to do that,” said McKay.
“Did you follow me enough before you lit up the lights and pulled me over to the side? My data says no. I don’t know what the judge will say”, added McKay.
