The Tesla Cybertruck is not a vehicle you buy for subtlety.

Bulky, obnoxious, and exorbitantly expensive, the angular, stainless-steel wedge seems tailor-made for the rich and famous. It’s a 7,000-pound statement piece that screams, “Look at me,” even when it’s just parked.

Take the Grammy-winning R&B superstar Aliaune “Akon” Thiam, for example. His custom white-wrapped Cybertruck is a rolling spectacle, even in the flashy suburbs of Atlanta. But last week, that high-tech, high-visibility status symbol turned into a high-tech leash.

On November 7, Akon was arrested by police in Chamblee, Georgia. The arrest itself was surprisingly mundane, but the method was pure 21st-century. According to reports from CBS News and Fox 5 Atlanta, authorities executed a bench warrant for his failure to appear in court on a case involving a suspended license.

And how did they find him? They didn’t have to look very hard.

Police didn’t spot Akon driving erratically or running a red light. Instead, a quiet alert was triggered by a network of Flock surveillance cameras. These pole-mounted, automated license plate readers are installed across the Atlanta suburbs, silently scanning every car that passes by and checking their plates against a hotlist of wanted vehicles, stolen cars, and warrants.

Akon’s white Cybertruck, impossible to miss, tripped the wire.

The system flagged the truck as being linked to a person with an active warrant, and it electronically followed the vehicle to a local auto shop called Tint World on Chamblee Dunwoody Road. The irony is potent: Akon was reportedly at the shop to get his windows darkened, a move to make his all-too-visible truck a little more private.

It was too late.

Chamblee police officers arrived at the Tint World, spotted the unmistakable Cybertruck, and saw a man standing nearby who matched the driver’s license photo of its registered owner: Aliaune Thiam.

According to the incident report, the officers approached the “Smack That” singer and informed him of the outstanding warrant. Akon, sources say, remained “calm” and told the officers he was “aware of the warrant.” He was arrested without incident, booked into the DeKalb County jail, and released roughly six hours later.

But this arrest wasn’t the beginning of the story. It was the predictable end of a saga that started two months earlier, with the exact same truck.

The plot, as they say, thickens when you rewind to September 10.

On that day, police in the neighboring city of Roswell found the same white Cybertruck “stranded” and bricked in the middle of a busy roadway. Akon, who was at the wheel, reportedly told officers the futuristic truck’s battery had simply died.

As officers waited for a tow truck, they did what they always do: they ran his plates and his license. That’s when the real problems began.

According to reports from TMZ and the Associated Press, police discovered that Akon’s driver’s license had been suspended since January 2023 for a previous failure to appear in court. To make matters worse, the six-figure truck apparently had no active liability insurance policy, which is mandated by law.

And in a detail that only adds to the scene, officers also noted in their report that they seized an “illegal vape” from the truck’s center console.

That day in September, Akon was given a citation for driving on a suspended license and released from the scene. He was, however, given a new court date to answer for the charge.

He allegedly never showed up. That failure to appear is what triggered the bench warrant that the Flock cameras so neatly sniffed out last week.

Whether police would have picked him up in a different, more common car—a black Mercedes or a gray Range Rover, perhaps—is a mystery. But rumbling down the road in a white, street-illegal Cybertruck (illegal not because of the truck itself, but because he was driving it without a valid license or insurance) was all but painting a target on his back.

In the end, the Cybertruck is the central character in this comedy of errors. A vehicle designed to look like an armored transport from the future, marketed on its toughness and off-grid capabilities, was defeated by two very mundane things: a dead battery and a forgotten court date.

For all its “bulletproof” bravado, the Cybertruck proved to be the worst possible getaway car, a conspicuous beacon that broadcast its owner’s legal troubles to every automated eye on the road.

Akon, for his part, doesn’t seem too fazed. Just two days after his six-hour stint in jail, the international superstar was on a plane to India, where he performed a scheduled concert in Delhi.

A representative for the singer told Hello! Magazine, the whole thing was a “clerical issue” and that the suspended license “should have never been escalated,” claiming it was paid but not properly entered into the system.

That may be so. But it’s a telling snapshot of modern celebrity: getting arrested in one of the world’s most advanced vehicles over a simple suspended license one day, and flying 8,000 miles to play for a sold-out stadium the next.