Everything to do with driving a Tesla Roadster is right here.
There are very few people left at Tesla that can even rebuild one of
these. This is the entire motor and transmission out of a Roadster.
One of the things that's so great about a Tesla is the fact that they're
no simple. There's only four or five moving parts in that transmission to
fail, instead of like in your van that you're driving that's got four or
five hundred parts in it.
Carl's famous among the Roadster owners.
I mean, famous.
He works on this car, he hand tightens every single bolt on the car.
I can tell. Like, if it was a blind test and I said, all right, who did
it? Was it Carl?
Or was it Tesla Shop?
The official shop. I could tell just by driving it.
He took my Roadster and he installed sound insulation and made a couple of
other changes and it became like a different car.
So and I just liked the guy.
He's very honest, straightforward.
I like people who love what they're doing and that's Carl to a t.
I've worked on cars for 30 years. The level of the guys at Tesla that have
done what they've done. It's just crazy.
I worked at Tesla from May of 2009 through February of 2013.
And after I left Tesla, I didn't work on Tesla's for the first year and
then the Roadster owners were not getting the satisfaction and the level
of work quality that they wanted.
So a few of them started contacting me.
Now I'm working on most of them.
People come here versus going to the Tesla service center, I think we
provide a better service and I think people have just gotten fed up with
the way service has been handled.
There's probably a Roadster owner in the Seattle area that still uses
Tesla service, but there aren't that many.
There is a total of about fifteen hundred of these cars.
I don't know the exact number, I don't know how many are still on the
street. LED lighting, a lot of state of the art stuff back then.
Super fast, zero to sixty in 3.9
seconds. This is probably one of the earliest ones that people would ever
see. This is VIN 45.
This car here is VIN number 57.
It belonged to David Ogden Stiers, the actor from MASH.
He was a good client of mine for all the 10 years and then in his will he gave me this car.
The types of people that come to our shop are ranged from billionaires to,
you know, guys that maybe have a thousand bucks in their pocket.
So the people that bought these cars, all the ones who bought them in
Seattle were tech people. They had to put a deposit on them a couple of
years before they were even built.
So they put a substantial amount of money down on these cars in hopes that
this company would even build a car.
So the fact that these people even got deliveries of the car, you've never
seen somebody so excited.
The tree hugger in me feels a little bit better, at least.
But the technologist more than the tree hugger.
I wanted to support this technology.
When I when I picked it up, you know, Carl took me around.
This is what, this is how this works, this is how this works.
He would take off little plastic covers and show me how it works.
And it was just fascinating.
This is technology that needs to be mainstream.
I want to buy the car and I want also invest in this company because I
want this to be the future.
I started out as a service manager for the Seattle area.
Tesla kind of blew up so I quickly was promoted to managing basically the
West Coast. Everything under the hat of Tesla in the service and parts
side was something that I was doing.
Back in the early days, service was amazing.
Everybody knew Carl Medlock by name at the Westlake Center.
He knew all of us.
He knew what numbers we'd go, you know, the last four digits of the VIN.
Mine's 1322. He knew right off, 1322's here.
In the northwest, a hundred percent customer satisfaction was required.
It wasn't an option.
And so with that in mind, that's how we treated the customers.
Tesla, they had a mass exodus where they fired people but in my fathers
and my case, you know, we were let go under some political issues.
They terminated the both of us within about 20 seconds of each other.
The whole environment at Tesla about who's going to get who next.
That's who's left at Tesla.
Is who can play the game better.
It's not who's better, it's about who can play the game better.
The Roadster community within Tesla we were all kind of worried when the
Model S came out that we were gonna be left behind and were worried for a
good reason, we kind of were. First Carl left and then some of the other
people who were really good. And so one by one the Tesla Roadster owners
have gravitated over here.
There's a local body shop here that has, at times, has over a hundred
model 3s that need paintwork and or body panels.
There's a Tesla Roadster that sat at the Seattle service center for over a
year and a half waiting for one component.
I just had a Tesla owner, very high profile local Tesla owner that
everybody would know his name, told me last Thursday that he sold all of
his Tesla stock because of how poor his services is.
Handed me the keys to his car and said, thank you for coming to get my
car. And this is a guy who owns every model that they have.
And now I'm working on all of his cars because he can't get them fixed at
the service center. Six months from an appointment.
There's a saying in the car business, the sales department sells the first
car, the service department sells every car after that.
And I've lived by that. I don't have any signs on my building.
I have never spent a dollar on advertising in my entire life.
I'm a word of mouth business. I have cars shipped to me from Florida.
I've had cars here from Los Angeles.
I get referrals all over.
I'm on the Facebook Tesla Motors Roadster page and people refer to me all
the time from there. And I have Tesla employees referring stuff to me.
I mean, you say Carl in a Tesla, everybody knows, right?
Oh wow, what did you do? Your stereo sounds better than mine.
All I have to do is say, Carl.
Ah he's got something, and he did.
He put another amp in it.
And so that's the thing, Carl tinkers and tech people appreciate it.
We love people who can nerd out on **** and build things.
We love that. Carl's like a hero to the Tesla community.
This car's hand built. There was no assembly line.
There was a big pile of parts and a few dudes, because I flew down to
watch it be built, you know, down in California.
And there's a bunch of dudes and they put it together and he's one of 'em.
So why wouldn't you want that guy working on your car?
Tesla knows that we exist, especially knows that my father exists.
Tesla sent me a cease and desist.
I wrote go **** yourself on the envelope and sent it back.
They said I wasn't qualified to put body panels on the car.
So basically we talked about, and I said, well, who trained your body
shops? Well, you did.
There are no aftermarket parts for Tesla's, the main reason is Tesla's
just jerks. They make it absolutely impossible for anyone to do business
with them. They don't sell parts to aftermarket facilities.
They won't sell parts to me. And I just started making the parts myself.
We'll take a good component that is not crashed, or crushed, or destroyed
and we'll take it off of another car that is good.
We'll cast a mold off of that piece and we'll literally make a brand new
hood or a brand new piece out of carbon fiber. And that's how we make the hoods.
This is my Tesla parts storage.
This is where all the used parts or crashed parts, I save every little
piece. I save even the smallest of pieces of these cars 'cause Tesla
doesn't have any parts anymore. That's what I'm having to do to put these
cars back together. Bumpers.
There's my bumper pile.
I have a whole bunch of new parts storage, but all the used stuff is out
here. We collect headlights.
We collect anything, this Roadster, even these pans, even though these
pans are ripped up and they're destroyed.
I can take that to a machine shop, into a tin shop, and I can actually
have another one of those stamped out, have the holes put in it and make a
new pan. Cause I have the pattern?
That's what we're down to on these cars now.
I don't have any diagnostic software to fix these cars.
I fix these cars because I know how the components work.
I literally go step by step and diagnose it the hard way.
And I don't have a magic bullet, I don't have a scanner that I can plug in
and say, oh, this is what's wrong with the car.
They are locking you out of cars.
They don't want you working on the cars because as they've gotten more
complicated, it takes a different skill set to understand what you're
working on and how you're working on it.
I completely understand why Tesla is doing it, but they should have a
certification program or a training program for outside vendors, and
suppliers, and aftermarket people like myself and others that want to work on their cars.
It's a good business model, I think, to start a line of EV shops that just
do EVs. The problem is there's not a lot of money in it because there's
not a lot to break.
No dealership wants to sell an electric vehicle because there's no service
work. The money in car dealerships is made in the service center, not in
the sales department. EVs don't make sense for car dealers.
They make sense for the environment, they makes sense for the public.
But they don't make sense for car dealers. That's why they're hard to push.
You know, there's a lot of haters out there on Tesla.
But the truth is, who else in your lifetime can you say innovated
something like this? This is some completely new.
Now Elon's having some troubles and he's bouncing off the bottom here and
there. But you know what?
He still did it. You know, I think the guy's a jackass sometimes, but I
still support him.