- [Daniel] You're not gonna find anywhere
like this in the world.
- This beam, you don't see this in any car.
- They really didn't know what they were doing
when they were building the Roadster.
(dynamic music)
Those of you that have been watching my channel for a while
know that we have a red original Tesla Roadster,
like the ones that came out in 2008 to 2012.
We actually have two of 'em,
we have a red one and we have a blue one.
But today, this is not my red Roadster,
and this is not my purple Roadster.
Today I came to Seattle Washington to see
one of the only Tesla repair shops in the entire world.
If your Tesla breaks, or it has issues,
or the battery pack dies, or your fender breaks,
you would think, like most car manufacturers, it's a Tesla,
you would just go to the Tesla service center.
But in reality, there aren't people around at Tesla
that know how to fix Roadsters anymore,
or to even service them properly.
So this is Carl Medlock.
This is his shop with his sons.
These are his sons over here,
it really is Carl Medlock and Sons.
That's the name of your company, right?
- Medlock and Sons. - Medlock and Sons.
There you go.
Carl actually used to work for Tesla.
He actually serviced and worked on
the red Roadster that I currently have.
Is this wrapped purple.
- Nope, this car is a one-off, VIN 744,
that was custom painted.
It's a Lamborghini color called Aubergine Purple.
- Custom painted by Tesla? - By Tesla.
- [Daniel] Oh, how many did they make of this?
- One? - Wait one.
- There's one in the United States
and there's supposedly one in Europe,
but I have never seen it.
This car's here from California.
VINs 500 through VINs 750 ended up with,
some of them have this problem.
It's called a sheet alarm,
and there's a rivet in it that comes loose
inside of the battery and shuts the car off.
So we're gonna pull the battery out of the car
check all the rivets and the sheets.
- I've never seen underneath a Roadster before.
Big old plate under here.
I, you know I like blue.
Look at this blue color.
That is nice.
I'm starting to feel that my red and blue Roadsters
are not all that unique
because it seems like there's a lot of 'em.
- This color is not that common.
This color is less common.
This is VIN 203.
We're doing a sound reduction package.
These cars are inherently noisy.
This belonged to a Microsoft executive,
and then it's been sold a couple of times.
This car's back now after about its third owner,
and we're gonna do sound reduction material.
A lot of the noise in this car comes from right here.
(car knocking)
It's like a little speaker box in there,
and it makes all kinds of noise.
So we put material on there.
- Okay. - Fix that.
- [Daniel] What is this big metal thing right here?
- This is one of the most incredible things
about these cars.
This beam, you don't see this in any car.
It's just a steel door.
This beam is a cross beam.
It's a structural piece.
It goes all the way around.
And the door latch goes here, latches onto here.
And then there's a roll bar that's here.
So this is basically a full cage car.
So the reason the door is off the car,
the way that the body is designed,
that a lot of road noise comes up into here.
So we put sound reduction material on the bottom of that.
So when we're done with that,
it sounds like your pillow, thunk, thunk.
You can't hear anything.
We'll take 32-DB off the inside of this car.
- Whoa!
Elon and Tesla were kind of just learning
when they were making this Roadster.
And honestly, I don't even know
how much Elon likes the Roadsters.
I know that sounds weird to say,
but he sent the one to space already.
That looked really cool, Starman up there.
But at the same time, if you wanna get your car serviced,
and you wanna take it to Tesla,
there's not that many people that service them.
Tesla doesn't have parts for it.
And so you do need to go to other shops like this.
And then in the back of the lot,
you have more beautiful Roadsters.
We've got an orange one,
we've got a red one, which is a Roadster Sport.
And then kind of this one,
what is the name of this one again?
- Radiant Red. - Radiant Red.
This is the one of my friend Zack has,
Radiant Red, awesome color.
And then another blue one.
I love that blue.
It's kind of like a North Carolina blue.
It's a little lighter than mine.
Mine's kind of in your face,
electric blue, with the 523.
Canada's only like 125 miles away from here,
but some of them are stuck here because of Coronavirus.
So some of these customers
have their cars just here waiting.
This is not like a normal Tesla.
If you run the battery to zero,
like zero charge in there at all, you're done for.
It's not gonna come back.
They call it bricked.
When somebody's battery dies,
they can bring it to you, right?
- That's right, that's what we do.
- With your Tesla Model X, Model S, Model Y, Model 3,
it's still not good to run it to zero,
but it's not the end of the world.
Well, with a Roadster, it's a completely different story.
People put 'em in their garage,
it cools down the batteries.
If you don't check on it every week and plug it in,
there's a chance it could just run down to zero.
And then you're done.
These are fancy cars that people don't drive every day.
At least most normal people don't drive every day.
I know a couple of people that do drive it everyday
for work, but they're a unique batch of people.
- So how this car came here was
it was taken to a service center because it wouldn't charge.
This part was bad, it's called a formidable controller.
They put a new one in the car, this one actually,
but they plugged it in backwards.
So this connector will actually go both places.
One goes to the compressor,
one is the high voltage to the battery.
And because they plugged it in backwards,
the car still wouldn't charge.
It sat there, and sat there,
they didn't know what was wrong with it.
And eventually the battery died and the car was bricked.
- Does Tesla have a lot of people
that actually work on Roadsters right now?
- Well, I would say there's probably maybe 10 people
left in the United States, maybe less.
If you own one of these cars
you really need to do your due diligence
and find out where there's
a old school Roadster tech like me,
that call us OGs, that can fix these cars.
If not, they're just looking at something
they've never seen before.
- [Daniel] So we know the story of this one.
What about these other cars?
- So this orange one, and this blue one,
belong to the same guy.
He's a collector, he has five of them.
That one came here, he bought out of California.
He imported it into Vancouver
because there's very few of them in Canada,
and he like doubles his money on it.
But he actually never wants to sell them now,
so he just keeps them.
This car has under a thousand miles on it.
- [Daniel] Whoa!
- It's not only Very Orange, which is a uncommon color.
There were only 70 sets of these wheels.
And they actually were taken off the cars
because Elon didn't like them.
- [Daniel] And then we just have random batteries
that are just out here.
This is from a Roadster Sport.
- This battery has zero volts in it.
It was dying long enough
that it actually died all the way.
- [Daniel] Oh man.
(drill whirring)
We are inside of the beast right here.
- These are these individual sheets.
There's 11 of them.
6,831 cells distributed out.
These are nine bricks per sheet.
If these batteries are hot,
when I have my hand on it like I just had,
it is completely unsafe.
The first thing you do when you take one of these
batteries apart is you take this off
and you break the battery right here.
So you cut the voltage in half.
That's the first thing you have to do,
is you have to actually take this tie bar out,
and then you work with high voltage gloves.
But this battery has zero volts in it,
so there's no chance of, I mean,
I can lick the thing and it wouldn't do anything.
- [Daniel] Have you ever licked a Tesla Roadster battery?
- No, I have not. (Daniel laughs)
- I know what you guys are thinking, and yes,
I do wanna start pulling this out,
and smashing it, and seeing all of those 6,000 cells.
But we're not going to.
This is, he's gonna salvage this for parts.
Zack from JerryRigEverything would appreciate that.
One of the problems with the Tesla Roadster
is they don't make parts anymore.
They used to have parts at their facility,
and then once they decided to move on to the model S,
they just kind of disappeared.
It's really difficult to find parts.
In fact, there are reports by some people
that Tesla is just taking Tesla Roadsters
and trading them in, perfectly fine Tesla Roadsters,
upgrading people to a Tesla Model Y or a Model 3.
And then what they're doing is just taking that Roadster,
and tearing it down, and using it for parts
'cause they don't have any.
Okay Carl, this one looks pretty much brand new.
What's the story on this gray one?
- Guy called me up and said he wanted to sell his Roadster.
He was in Wyoming, but he would bring it to me.
All right, how much do you want for it?
He told me the price and I thought, I'll buy it.
Get's here, and it's been driving up Wyoming roads
for so long there was literally two shovel-fulls of dirt
in the back of this car.
- [Daniel] Two shovel-fulls.
- Of powdered road dirt.
This thing was out farming all day.
A Microsoft guy came and wanted to buy a car that we had,
a blue one, like the two inside.
He wanted to buy one of those.
And he said, oh, I don't like that color.
I want this color.
And I said, well, that car's not for sale
'cause it's broken.
He said, well, how long would it take you to fix it?
And I said, I don't know, 30 days, 60 days.
He goes, I want the silver one.
And he bought everything we could
possibly do to a Roadster is on this car.
- [Daniel] No.
- We did matte finished top.
- [Daniel] Oh yeah, I've never seen that.
- That's matte finish.
We did these mirrors, the hood.
We upgraded the wheels.
We upgraded the nose from that nose.
- [Daniel] Oh yeah, that's the one I have on 523.
- And we upgraded to this. - The sportier one.
- We made a one-off front spoiler.
That's in matte.
Rear spoiler's the same.
We completely gutted the car out,
took a black interior out and all the dirt with it.
And the guy gave us complete
freedom of expression on this car.
All he cared about is that he got it back in about 90 days.
And so we picked the colors, and we showed 'em to him,
and he goes, that's great.
He never disagreed with anything that we chose.
And this is how the car turned out.
- [Daniel] Once you have a Roadster that's like this,
that's not original, it's not authentic,
does it still hold its value,
and is it still something that people wanna buy?
- Yes, this car, we actually,
we have two other people that are talking to us right now,
trying to negotiate on building another car like this one.
It's not the first owners, 'cause they like to be purists
and they want 'em all original.
But these second and third owners are bringing 'em to us
and want, I want wheels, I want tops, I want this.
Mostly audio, a lot of audio.
And we're doing it.
- They did everything on this thing to make it look good.
And honestly, it looks like that might be
the direction of some Roadsters.
Because some of the stuff that Tesla did early on,
yeah, they're a big company right now,
and they're still learning right now.
But back then, they really didn't know
what they were doing when they were building the Roadster.
That's why from number 200 to number 1400,
the number of differences they have
inside of it is pretty extreme.
And I think that's why Elon, at one point,
just like walked away.
He's like, okay, we learned how to make an electric car.
We learned what not to do.
Let's go build cars the way that we should do it.
These cars are beautiful.
They're amazing.
They're here, but they do need some work.
I wanna see a wrecked Roadster.
Okay, we're going on a ride right now
in the silver Roadster.
We gotta roll up the windows.
I wanna hear the sound dampening.
If you've never been in a Tesla Roadster,
one thing you'll learn is that they're incredibly small.
Yeah, you're like shoulder to shoulder
with the person next to you.
It's tiny.
We are pulling up to the warehouse.
This is their offsite secret warehouse
that has some of the other Roadsters
and the other projects that they're working on.
Okay, that's a nice Roadster.
That is really quiet.
That's a good ride.
And it's fast.
What happens when you're in a little tiny car
and you get into a wreck?
We've got two wrecked Roadsters here.
Look at that guy up there.
Oh, that's sad to see.
The back is all messed up, the front.
I mean, I feel like that could be worse, but whoa.
Okay, and then this one.
Yikes, are you kidding me?
What in the world?
Look at the windshield.
Look at the dashboard that's no longer there.
The seats.
What the heck?
- [Carl] This car was in an accident in California
about six months ago.
It hit a telephone pole on the corner there
at 75 miles per hour.
I know that because the screen still said 75 miles per hour.
- [Daniel] It still says it on there?
- It still did, I took a picture.
They had to be cut out of the car
'cause the car was upside down.
This is the roller cover.
It bent the roll bar back and it skinned the seat.
But your head doesn't even probably
go to the top of the seat in these cars, they're high seats.
That's from dragging down the pavement.
But look, it barely damaged the seats.
Passenger refused treatment.
And the driver was in the hospital for a few days.
But these cars are so robust and so strong that, you know,
there were basically, their injuries weren't that bad.
I bought this car for $12,000.
- [Daniel] Wow.
- I needed parts.
And if it's bigger than a quarter I can use it.
The motor's still good, the transmission's still good.
And strangely enough, this car had a good 3.0 battery in it.
- No. - Yeah.
- The battery pack was a 3.0, which is the one that I have.
It's the latest one.
Which if you wanna go to Tesla and get that,
or if you wanted to come here and get a 3.0 battery pack,
it's around 30 to $35,000 just to get that pack installed.
So paid $12,000 for a wrecked Tesla,
got a battery that's worth 30,000.
I think it was a pretty good investment there.
All right, well Carl and Sons have a special treat for me.
This, what am I looking at here?
Is this like a full-on battery pack?
- This is one of the 11 sheets out of a battery.
This one's completely dead.
- [Daniel] Wow.
Oh yeah, you can see the little batteries inside of it.
- One of the reasons Tesla is so safe is
each one of these cells, that's called a wire bond,
it's actually a fusible wire, and it'll pop that wire.
So the cell's fused, this is fused,
and then the battery is fused also.
So these cars are incredibly safe
with as far as electronics.
It's gonna be hard, really hard.
I think that's why you've never ever seen
a Roadster burn up.
Keep in mind, this was actually designed in like 2003, 4, 5.
And this, I mean, they were testing these cars in 2007.
And this, this is fantastic.
This is the first production electric car that was,
that brought Tesla to the market.
(dynamic music)
- So one of the reasons why I came up here is selfishly,
I need to find a solution to my Roadster.
Basically the carbon fiber on the front of it,
the original from Tesla, it got really, really foggy,
and it looked really cheap.
Carl and Sons can replace the carbon fiber.
They make the carbon fiber parts for this.
So I wanted to check it out for myself and see what they do.
You got all kinds of carbon fiber parts here.
- This is the door cell that belongs on these cars.
Tesla sold these for $1,600 a pair.
Very few people bought them.
They have these foam ones.
These are actually in better shape than most.
They're cheap, they're made out of foam.
You slide into these getting out of the car.
Most of 'em are cracked and falling apart.
But what we did was, we made a mold.
And this is a layup for one, that's a pair out of the mold.
And this is the finished product.
- [Daniel] Nice.
Yeah, I have this on my red one,
but I don't have it on the blue one.
I've got that cheap plasticky thing.
- We make all the spoilers now,
we're making the hood pieces that you're gonna use.
- [Daniel] So mine wasn't like wrecked or anything,
nobody's scratched it or damaged it.
It just was like really cloudy and cheap.
What's the deal with that?
- So what happens is, there's different grades of resin
that you can use when you're casting.
But some of the parts were made in China
and some of 'em were made in France.
The ones that are made in France looked like this.
- [Daniel] Oh, that's way better.
- This is a 10 year old part and it still looks fantastic.
That was made in another country, it's not as good.
It was really a poor quality.
This is what your hood should look like.
And a good quality clear, they'll last a lifetime of a car.
But what you need is, you need these three new pieces,
or we need to put new carbon fiber on top of yours.
- We'll fix it.
This does not have a battery pack inside of it.
The battery pack was taken out and now it's empty.
Look at that.
But the battery pack weighs 900 pounds.
You can see what the suspension does, it just raises up.
You're not gonna find anywhere like this in the world
with all of these Roadsters,
and somebody that cares so much about it,
and is passionate about it.
I probably shouldn't say this,
but then you've got Tesla over here,
buying brand new cars that totally work
and tearing those ones down for parts.
It just doesn't feel right.
Here's another one that's all busted up, right here.
Oh man.
The whole front looks...
What happened on this guy?
- This car was rear-ended pretty hard.
And it shoved up underneath another,
believe it or not, a pickup.
And the trailer hitch of the pickup did this.
- [Daniel] No.
The hitch went through here and pushed that up.
Okay, that's big time.
- The back of this car's all bent up,
but the battery's good.
This car still drives.
I drove this car right here.
These cars are so tough.
I can put you in the passenger seat of this car,
and take you around the block,
and you wouldn't even know that the car was crashed.
The car's still in alignment.
Even though it's bent back here, it's still in alignment.
- There's a lot of really cool things inside of here.
This is, like is part of the battery pack, I don't,
what do you call, the electronics?
What do you call this thing?
- [Man] It's called a PEM, power electronics module.
- PEM, power electronics module.
When Starman went to space in the Roadster,
everybody said that they thought it was cool
that the Tesla said, made on Earth by humans.
Well, right down in here, where it says,
authorized personnel only, if you look really close,
it says, made on Earth by humans.
And then this, this is one of
the only Tesla refrigerators in the world.
And it's here at Carl's shop.
I think I might need to get one of those someday.
There's some more over there in the bushes.
More Roadsters, just chilling over there.
They're everywhere.
I've been here for a long time today
and it's been really, really fun.
I'm even wondering like how much I actually got on camera
because we've been seeing so many cool things
and having a great time.
But here is the plan.
I'm going to work on getting the parts,
probably gonna send up my hood, up here to get worked on,
so that I can get the new pieces on it.
And Carl and I have been talking, we have a really,
really good idea of a crazy thing to do with the Roadsters.
I think he thinks I'm a little crazy
wanting to do this idea.
But I can't do it without getting my Roadster ready
and getting some actual tuneups.
So we're probably gonna come back up here
and do a few more videos at some point.
And we're gonna make a crazy video with my Roadster.
I can't tell you,
I wanna tell you what we're going to do,
but I'm not going to tell 'em.
Am I crazy?
Am I crazy, is my idea kinda dumb?
- I think it's a great idea. - Great idea?
- I think it's a great idea. - Do you think I can do it?
- I think you could do it.
I think we're gonna help you do it.
- So stay tuned for that.
And let me know your thoughts.
What was the favorite thing that you guys saw today?
If you wanna buy a Tesla Roadster,
or if you wanna get one that's a little bit beat up,
and get it retrofitted, and make it look amazing,
like this silver one, Carl's your guy.
All right, we'll see you guys.
I just came up here because I saw a video of his shop online
and I wanted to meet him.
I'd be pretty confident in saying that Carl
is the world's top expert when it comes to
the electronics module, the batteries, and fixing Teslas.
In no way was I compensated for this video,
other than, he did buy me
a really good burrito for lunch today.
Have you met Elon before?
- I have, several times.
- [Daniel] Have you worked on any of his cars or anything?
- I worked on the black Roadster,
I think it's cherry red now, but.
- I saw the black one.
I think it was the Model Y yeah, it was the model Y
when they first introduced it to everybody,
he brought his black Roadster out on the stage.
- That's right.
I've driven that car, I've worked on that car.
And the VIN, I think it's VIN 686 that went into space.
I never worked on that one, that car I think was damaged.
It went over a rockery by a sales associate.
The bottom of it was damaged.
I think that's kind of the reason that car went into space.
I don't know that's the reason, but, whatever.
Tool that I've been looking for.