Three brand-new original Tesla Roadsters have been found sitting in a shipping container in China for over a decade; now they are going for sale.
Tesla ever only produced just over 2,000 original Roadsters between 2008 and 2011, making them rare in the first place.
On top of the usual unit you lose to accidents and time, Roadsters had a few bad luck incidents, including losing dozens of units to two separate fires at Gruber Motors, which specializes in fixing first-generation Tesla Roadsters.
Now Gruber is trying to bring a few back to life. The Arizona-based company announced that three original Tesla Roadsters were found in China.
They wrote in an email:
In 2010, a customer in China bought three brand-new Roadsters from Tesla. They got shipped to a dock in China, but were abandoned by the buyer. They have been sitting in sea containers, sealed, with zero miles, at a port, since 2010, untouched, accruing storage charges into six figures. A new owner found them and is selling them.
Aesthetically speaking, the Roadsters are in great condition since they have been untouched for over a decade and even still have the factory paper floor mats:
But leaving any vehicle powered down and parked for over a decade comes with a lot of problems.
With electric vehicles, the main problem is that the battery pack becomes depleted, and it can “brick” it, meaning that it can’t be charged back.
Gruber says that it won’t know the extent of the problem until it gets hands on the vehicles:
What we do not yet know is if the ESS pack Service Plugs were pulled before shipment, and even more intriguing, if they were, is there any life left in the packs after 13 years of storage. We will not know until they are retrieved and fired up.
Gruber Motors is already trying to help the seller find buyers in the current condition, but it plans to have the cars shipped to its facility in the US by mid-May if a buyer can’t be found while the vehicles are still in China.
If Gruber can bring the energy systems back to life, they will likely be some of the most pristine original Tesla Roadsters in the world.
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