Tesla police vehicle upfitting for Georgia and Southeast agencies. Engineered by a contractor that has been building mission-critical infrastructure for public safety since 2001 — not an accessory shop that added a light bar.
This is no longer a question of whether an electric patrol vehicle works. Departments have run them through full service lifecycles and published the numbers. Here is what they found.
First Model 3 in 2019. Now 13 Teslas — five Model 3 and eight Model Y — including the first Model Y K-9 unit, which uses the vehicle's own climate hold to keep the dog safe between calls. Chief Todd Bertram has reported one month where four gasoline patrol cars cost $3,100 to fuel while all thirteen Teslas cost $300 to charge. The town says fuel savings alone fund two additional officer positions.
Ten Model Y patrol units and ten Model 3 for detective and administrative assignment, approved by council in September 2022. Administrative vehicles ran roughly $4,900 a year to charge against $14,000 to $15,000 a year in prior fuel cost. Their fleet manager was explicit that the decision was operational first and financial second. Note the timeline: the retrofit program took eight months.
Murphy PD has fielded Model Y Juniper patrol units, with projected operational savings of $4,100 to $7,600 per vehicle per year on standard patrol assignment. Las Vegas Metro is running Cybertruck patrol vehicles. The platform question is settled; what varies now is the quality of the integration.
A police vehicle is a mobile workstation, a secure transport, and an emergency response platform that must function reliably at three in the morning in the rain. Every subsystem below is specified against your agency's standing orders, not a catalog.
| Emergency lighting | Roof, grille, mirror, interior and perimeter lighting to agency specification, with take-down, alley and scene lighting. Wig-wag and cruise-light modes configured to policy. |
| Siren and public address | Amplifier, speaker mounting, horn-ring integration and control head placement that keeps the driver's hands in position. |
| Console and mounting | Custom console around the Tesla center stack. This is the single most reported ergonomic complaint on Tesla patrol builds, and it has to be solved for duty belt clearance and weapon access, not designed around the factory layout. |
| Weapon mounts | Locking rifle and shotgun mounts, electronically released, positioned for access from a seated position in full gear. |
| Prisoner transport | Partition, rear seat replacement, window and door control lockout, and floor pan protection for cleanability. |
| K-9 configuration | Insulated compartment, temperature monitoring with alarm, remote door release, and use of the vehicle's climate hold function. |
| In-cabin computing | Mobile data terminal, mounting and power. See the section below on eliminating the arm-mounted laptop. |
| Communications | Land mobile radio installation, antenna siting and cabling, cellular and modem integration. This is our core discipline. |
| Cameras and evidence | Forward-facing camera, interior camera, ALPR where specified, and integration with the agency's evidence management platform. |
| Charging infrastructure | Depot charging design, load calculation, service capacity assessment and installation coordination with a licensed electrical contractor. |
On a conventional patrol vehicle, the engine runs and the alternator carries the load. Officers idle for hours and the electrical budget takes care of itself.
An electric vehicle has no such margin. Every amp drawn by lighting, radio, computing, cameras and climate comes off a low-voltage system fed by a DC-to-DC converter from the traction battery, with its own ceiling and its own behavior when the vehicle sleeps. Get this wrong and the failure does not appear in the shop. It appears on a long stakeout, at the end of a shift, with equipment browning out.
Load budgeting, converter capacity, auxiliary battery strategy, sleep and wake behavior, and fusing and circuit protection are the actual engineering content of an EV police build. Everything else is brackets and wiring loom.
This is the discipline we come from. Twenty-five years of designing power and communications systems that have to work when they are needed, for agencies that cannot accept an outage.
The mounted laptop is a legacy of vehicles that had nowhere else to put a screen. It consumes console space, obstructs sightlines, and is a documented injury hazard in a collision. We are evaluating in-vehicle computing that runs agency applications on the vehicle's existing display, under managed configuration, with no additional hardware in the occupant space. Where an agency requires a conventional MDT, we install one properly.
Specifications written to survive a competitive bid. Documented build sheets, itemized pricing, and a scope you can attach to a purchase order. We are registered with Georgia agencies and hold current vendor registrations, and we are accustomed to public sector procurement timelines and documentation requirements.
Any vendor who tells you an electric patrol car is better in every respect is selling you something. Departments that have run them have documented real complaints, and you should hear them from us rather than from your officers six months in.
Menlo Park PD reported the center console restricted weapon access and that space was tight for two officers in full patrol gear. This is a genuine constraint and it is the first thing a custom console has to address.
Officers have reported driver assistance interfering with the kind of driving police work requires. Configuration matters, and some agencies will want features disabled by policy.
The same department reported headlights timing out at night. These are software behaviors designed for consumer use that do not always suit continuous duty, and they need identifying during a pilot rather than after a fleet order.
Most departments running Teslas keep gasoline trucks and SUVs for assignments the platform does not suit. Bargersville does. A realistic program is a mixed fleet, not a wholesale replacement.
South Pasadena's twenty-vehicle program took eight months to retrofit. Budget cycles and deployment expectations should be set against that, not against a consumer accessory install.
Depot charging is part of the project, not an afterthought. Service capacity, load, and placement all have to be assessed before the first vehicle arrives.
We come to you. Assignment profile, shift patterns, standing orders, current fleet cost per mile, and charging capacity at your facility.
A written build specification and itemized cost, in a form you can attach to a purchase order or issue for competitive bid.
One vehicle, built and placed in service. Your officers run it and tell us what is wrong with it. We revise the specification before anything scales.
Production builds to the proven specification, with documented configuration per unit, spares provisioning and ongoing support.
SFT Ventures LLC has operated since 2001, building fiber, wireless and cellular infrastructure for airports, municipalities and public safety agencies across 23 states. Radio systems, networks and mission-critical communications where downtime is not an acceptable outcome.
South Atlanta EV Works is our electric vehicle division, based in Peachtree City. The public safety fleet program brings those two things together: agencies we already work with, and a platform whose operating economics are now proven.
We are direct about our stage. We have decades of public safety infrastructure work behind us and we are building our first police vehicle programs now. If you want a vendor with fifty completed Tesla patrol builds, that vendor exists and we will tell you who they are. If you want an integrator who understands your radio system, your network, and your power budget, and who will pilot before scaling, that is us.
Send us your current fleet size, annual mileage per unit, and fuel and maintenance spend, and we will model what the platform would actually cost your agency over a five-year lifecycle. No obligation and no charge. If the numbers do not work for your assignment profile, we will say so.
Harlan Hamlin · Public Safety Fleet
SFT Ventures LLC, d/b/a South Atlanta EV Works
301 Kelly Drive, Ste 3-183, Peachtree City, GA 30269
770-336-7944
fleet@southatlantaevworks.com
We will return a written five-year cost model and a draft build specification, typically within ten business days.