Imagine spending years of your life telling anyone who’d listen that you’d rather cut off your own ears and plug the holes with bondo than listen to Ariana Grande, then one day you do a complete about-face and splurge $1 million getting her to perform at your 40th birthday party.
No one would do that, so what on earth has possessed a man who presents as one of the world’s biggest Tesla haters to spend almost a million bucks on a bunch of decade-old Teslas in rough condition?
The man in question is billionaire Dan O’Dowd, who has railed against the self-driving software in cars like the Model 3 and Model S, and the Teslas are three Roadsters that hit the news last year when they were discovered in a shipping container in China. A Chinese company had bought them in 2011 with plans to tear them apart and reverse-engineer them, but customs officials blocked the importation and the cars sat in containers for a dozen years until they were shipped back to the U.S.
Photos of the cars went viral last year but the story then died down until YouTube channel What’s Inside? tracked them to a shop run by Roadster Specialist, Carl Medlock and Sons and put an entire video together looking at them in detail.
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Medlock worked on the Roadster project when the cars were new and reveals that O’Dowd, whose The Dawn Project recently ran two ads during the Superbowl warning of the dangers of Tesla’s autonomous systems, isn’t quite the Tesla hater some have him out to be. In fact, in addition to the three China Roadsters, O’Dowd owns a further two examples of the circa-2,000 electric two-seaters produced between 2008 and 2011.
But the newly-purchased Teslas are going to need some major work to get them back to a drivable state. Because they’ve sat so long without charge their batteries are ruined, which means O’Dowd could be looking at spending $100k on battery packs for each car on top of the $800k Medlock says he’s already forked out to buy the trio, Elektrek reports. Each one also needs plenty of cosmetic TLC to undo the damage caused by such a long hibernation.
Even if the cars are restored to peak condition, O’Dowd reportedly won’t be driving them. They’re currently the only untitled Roadsters in existence and Medlock claims the plan is to preserve them as museum exhibits.