High-end sports car. Faster than a Ferrari.
Faster than a Lamborghini.
Nothing compared to this.
Zero to 60 in 3.7 seconds.
It's fun from the moment you turn on the key.
It's like being shot out of a slingshot.
Any place I'd go, they put it in front.
They'd move the Ferrari out and put the Roadster in front of the restaurant.
What's that car in space?
It's a Tesla Roadster.
The first time I hit the accelerator pedal, I couldn't tell if I was in the future or the past.
This is the car that made the dream happen.
The technology has reinvigorated the automobile industry.
Once Tesla sort of slowly lost the
memory of these cars.
Tesla didn't keep their word when it came to the quality of service.
The Roadster owners were abandoned.
A lot of them sold their cars because they just couldn't get service.
I don't know a single Roadster owner who takes their Roadster to
Tesla, the company that made the damn car, to service it.
Welcome to Medlock and Sons.
I'm Carl Medlock and this is our Tesla Roadster repair shop.
My dad and I worked at Tesla early on.
He worked on the service side, I worked on the parts side.
Carl is known in the industry as being the godfather of Roadsters.
He truly is an answer to so many people's prayers.
It's better for the community that we just get these cars back on the road.
If it wasn't for Carl, I don't know if these cars would be salvageable because
no one would be around to maintain them.
But instead, they're out on the road and they're still running and they're still showing people, this is where it
all began.
The
Tesla Roadster came out in 2008.
2,500 were made total.
You really don't have to say anything to sell one of these cars.
You just had to go take somebody for a ride.
Nice truck.
The Roadster, in terms of electric vehicles, is the turning point
in viability for the industry.
It's the proof of concept that a car could be sexy and fast and electric.
The first electric cars, let's face it, looked like smart car.
They were goofy and they were still expensive.
I think he thought, all right, if it's going to be expensive, let's make it expensive.
But let's make it look cool.
It's based on a Lotus car.
You had a technology team trying to put an electric drive train in an existing
chassis. It just seemed like a one-off kind of modified hot-rodded version of something and
no one ever imagined that it would be what Tesla has become today.
I bought my Roadster new in 2009.
Back then, Tesla wasn't a thing.
No one had ever heard of Tesla.
The big dare was, I dare you to buy a Tesla and an equivalent number of stock in
Tesla. If you really believe in the company, do both.
I mean, I bought my car when Tesla stock was selling for like $22 a share.
I had no idea who Tesla was.
Electric car? No, thanks.
None of us really believed in this company.
We believed in the technology.
It was hard not to recognize that this is where the future was going and it was hard not
to get excited about that.
If you look at the client list of Tesla Roadsters, they were the who's who of the world.
The Google founders bought them and the first few hundred of these were in parking lots at
Microsoft and Google and Facebook.
This car used to belong to the lead counsel of Microsoft.
That was one of the original Microsoft 11 cars.
The yellow car here belonged to one of the guys who helped create the iPad.
The blue one here belonged to Sam Simon, the co-founder of The Simpsons TV show.
This orange one here belonged to David Vaskevitch, ex-CTO of Microsoft.
If you ever watched the TV show Bewitched, this car belongs to Tabitha.
Her name is Erin Murphy.
The group of Tesla owners, especially the Roadster owners, it's a fraternity of sorts.
We're not just here to own a car.
We're here to support Tesla, support the EV movement.
They really have a passion for not just the cars themselves, but the other owners.
It's kind of a big family almost.
I've been a part of the Tesla community for probably seven, eight years.
Other Tesla owners were always open to talking, helping.
It's like we're a part of a movement.
The Roadster community is like taking that and 10x'ing
it.
I was in on the original
order. That was back in 2007.
It took 22 months before my Roadster 282 was
delivered. One of the first 10 or so Roadsters that were in the area.
We all even came to each other's deliveries.
I drive it a lot, and as far as I know, it's the highest mileage roadster in the United
States. It's got
172,799 miles.
Its VIN number is 687 and its sister car, VIN number
686, is currently on its own orbit around the sun.
In the early days, we had this expression we call Tesla time.
Whenever you went someplace, you had to add some Tesla time because there were going to be people there asking
questions.
When you buy a car like this, you have to expect to talk to strangers in parking lots.
It's just part of the experience.
We spent a lot of time educating the public about Teslas and Roadsters in particular.
We were very much advocates, ambassadors, even evangelists for
the car.
The community has changed.
I mean, a lot of them abandoned the Roadster for a Model S when it came.
When the Model S launched, the customers were afraid of what was going to happen
to service for them because they weren't the priority anymore.
They kind of got back burnered.
Tesla kind of went from, this is our car, we will take care of
it. To, oh shit, we're making money for the first time on the Model S, wait in
line. To, yeah we still care about you guys.
To, Roadster what?
It always saddens us when we hear that one is wrecked.
It's always kind of a moment of silence.
The fire down in Arizona that destroyed like 30 of them.
It was that guy's second fire.
You realize that this species is in danger.
We figure that there is probably 1,500 left worldwide.
I would say probably 250 cars got totaled out just on poor estimates.
I was in an accident, a really bad accident.
It sheared off the whole front end of the car.
And the insurance company and Tesla, of course, wanted to just say no, let it go
because they didn't have the parts.
They didn't have a way to fix it.
And we were able to find Carl that could put it back together.
How have you been?
Good, long time no see.
The word got out there's people that are taking care of the Roadster again.
It was a familiar face.
People knew my dad and they knew what kind of guy he was and what kind of service he
provided.
Always have a tool guy among your friends.
The thing that really impressed me about Carl, the first time I brought it in for service.
He just took care of everything.
He didn't even need to be told what's wrong with the car.
He just fixed it all.
He detailed it.
The level of customer service, it was above and beyond.
He's a smart guy. He's found a niche where he's the best person in the world in doing this niche
car. And everybody loves
him.
My family is through and through motorheads.
We love cars. My dad built cars.
We built cars together. We've all built our own custom cars.
We do just about everything from bodywork, paintwork, mechanical
work, restoration work, electrical work.
If you can crash it, there's a good chance that we can fix it.
When Carl first left Tesla and opened up his own shop, it was big news.
Most of the Tesla Roadster owners would continue a service or two with Tesla,
and then it all started just moving over to Carl's shop.
People just started sending us their cars from all over.
All over the United States, Canada.
We've got cars that are being put on containers coming over here from Europe and China.
And I even traveled to a car in Costa Rica.
We're traveling to Australia.
It just kind of exploded.
We have now like 30 or 40 Roadsters that we have at the facility right now.
I'm in Texas. I've had two cars sent 2,000 miles to Washington State to
get worked on by Carl because I trust him the most.
He knows more about these cars and anyone else out there.
Early on at Tesla, we got to work directly with the engineers who developed some of these
systems. And so we got a knowledge that others didn't get.
I actually helped write the shop manual for this car, and the reality is there are no diagnostics.
Everything I do here is in my head.
This is my nemesis right here. This car has a very abnormal problem where
you can disconnect everything in the system and the water pump still runs.
So it's got a wire shorted to power and I just haven't found it yet.
In the meantime, it's just wiping the street with me and my pride.
I saw him as this mechanic guy.
He's an electrical engineer it turns out.
We've had a few Tesla service centers call us up that have never seen one of these things before.
And one of them actually said, look, we don't know anything about the Roadster,
so we're just going to send it to you.
This is the brains of the Tesla Roadster.
It's the PEM, power electronics module.
It handles all of the drive functions.
These parts are incredibly hard to find and they're not easy to replicate.
To make this board specifically, to reverse engineer it is about 60
grand. These are Tesla Roadster battery sheets.
In a battery pack you have 11 sheets.
This is the inside of a sheet.
Each one of these plates denotes a series, so you got a positive
and negative. There's little bond wires here and it's what actually is what the
voltage goes through.
There's 6,831 cells in one of these batteries.
Any one of them can short and cause a problem.
You have to know how to find it.
You would think that this toolbox would be full of tools.
It is not. It's full of electronics.
This is old tech when it comes to electric cars, but it's still high-tech for auto repair.
Eventually, this will be standard, but there's going to be a lot fewer because electric cars break a lot less.
The good news is nobody died and my car is worth more.
The top's good, if I ever need a new top.
So this one's totaled.
I haven't told the owner yet, but there's a dent in the frame right there.
And with that dent, they're gonna make me total it.
Yeah, they will.
This car just left here four months ago.
That's a rough four months.
Wow, that's frightening. But it's also encouraging that a wreck this
bad is survivable if you're in a good car.
Not so survivable. If you can save those, that's a miracle.
Oh, you haven't seen this picture.
Save all the green parts you can from my car in case I ever need them.
Were you really good at Legos when you were little?
I was.
You know, people see crashed cars.
I don't see crashed cars.
I see opportunities. I see a $30,000
job there, another one here and the parts right here to fix them.
I like doing this.
The minute the last car rolled off the assembly line, that was the end of the parts.
I contact people all over the world.
I find out where the wrecked ones were, the last home that they were at.
Do you have any parts left over?
I buy stuff every day from people who have bought these cars and have a little something on their shelf.
I could buy a parts car, and I did, for $5,000 three years ago.
I could buy a parts car for $10,000.
I bought one for $15,000, and those were cars that were complete.
Now I'm buying cars that are missing from the windshield forward for $40,000.
This car right here is VIN 767.
Was originally sold here in Seattle.
I bought it at the auction for $43,000 for a parts car, which sounds
crazy, but the battery's worth $25,000.
The PEM's worth 10,000.
All the suspension. This is a $4,000 trunk.
$1,000 bumper. $2,000 trunk box.
This car was coming to us from Georgia, and I know it looks like a pile of junk here, and pretty much for the most
part it is. But the transmission, at least the case would be good.
This board is still good.
I've had five or six calls from these cars from the accident scene, and I tell them, pick up everything bigger
than a quarter and throw it in the front seat.
A clip, a bolt, a screw, everything on this car is special.
If I can just harvest one piece, I'll call it a success.
These are our spare batteries.
These are 1,000 pounds apiece.
These are our hoods, we make a whole hood, including the frame.
Those are the last 15 good headlights up there.
Right side only, there are no left headlights available.
I'm going to take and horde every single thing I get my hands on.
It's the way I can stay in business to be able to fix the cars.
To fill that need we've built a lot of these carbon fiber parts.
We make pretty much every piece of carbon fiber that goes on the car.
We make all of these pieces that are on here, except for these.
This is the factory Bilstein suspension.
It's the last new set we know of in the world.
We actually had custom suspension made for these cars.
We had this grille made for the 2.5 cars because the plastic grilles are obsolete.
Oftentimes these cars, he can make them a little bit faster.
He can make them a little bit more reliable.
He can make them last a little bit longer.
Back when Martin Eberhard was terminated from Tesla, these two tops were
hanging on his wall. I'm going to give these back to Martin because he said he'd like to hang them on his wall.
So I thought, what a nice gesture for the guy who created Tesla is to give him back his parts.
Why not?
This is a rare breed now.
A few more years, they'll start turning 20, the age of a classic car.
Values are going to go up, but it really is the maintenance of a species.
The difficulty of buying a Roadster was overwhelming.
For 2020 and most of 2021, the transactions were a listing that
either got sold within an hour of being listed or a day.
So the values now have gone from $40,000 two years ago to $150,000,
$130,000, depending on the car that you have.
Recently, one has sold for $182,000, another one sold for $190,000.
We started seeing that median price jump from $68,000 to I think about
$112, $114,000, but with some really amazing examples of auction prices in
the $200, $250,000 range.
And that tells you when a car has really arrived.
I mean, it's funny because it's what everybody was saying when the cars were new, that it will eventually become a
collector car because if Tesla takes off, it's the first real electric vehicle and it's the
first vehicle from a company that now obviously is really successful.
For me, owning a piece of the original Tesla journey was important, but also just the
transition from EVs, in general, was important.
People do look at them as investments and the best part about it is they're fun.
You can't take your stock portfolio out for a drive.
You can't take your Bitcoin out for a drive, but you can take the Tesla Roadster out for a drive.
It's really cool, honestly, that so many people trust us with their cars and that we've
kind of become this big Roadster shop.
Now he's in this big shop and he has parties.
I remember last summer, there were probably a hundred people here.
People flew in from France just to come and see the largest collection
of Tesla Roadsters on the planet.
I think somebody flew from Asia to come.
I was like, wow, I just drove.
On the way over here today, twice.
I looked in my rearview mirror and the person behind me has got their phone up, taking a picture of my
car. This car is special and it still looks special.
People come up and say, that's a weird looking sports car.
What is that? And I say, It's a Tesla.
And they said, I've seen Teslas.
They don't look like that. Is that their new sports car?
It's like, no, no, it was the first Tesla.
You get all kinds of reactions from people.
What you don't get is I've never heard of Tesla
anymore.