In a surprising turn of events, we now learn that billionaire Dan O’Dowd bought the 3 Tesla Roadsters that were lost in a Chinese port for over a decade.
Last year, we reported on a strange story of three brand-new Tesla Roadsters that were found inside a shipping container in China.
It appears that a Chinese company bought the Roadster back in 2011 with the hope of reverse-engineering them. However, the shipment was blocked by customs in China and the vehicles never made it to the company.
Last year, someone finally was able to get them and ship them to the US.
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.
It makes the remaining ones more valuable, and ironically, Gruber was leading the auction for the lost Roadsters.
At one point, the company claimed that the three Roadsters together would go for over $1 million.
Almost a year later, we now know who bought them.
Dan of the popular YouTube channel What’s Inside got an exclusive look at the Roadsters – giving us a great look at this little piece of EV history:
Dan revealed Dan O’Dowd, the billionaire founder of Green Hills Software, is the new owner of the Roadster.
To Tesla fans, O’Dowd is better known as the guy running the Dawn Project, which is basically a campaign against Tesla’s Full Self-Driving effort.
It could be surprising, considering how consistently O’Dowd has been attacking Tesla and Elon Musk, but he is apparently a fan of Tesla vehicles other than its Autopilot and FSD Beta, which the Roadster is not equipped with anyway.
He already owns a couple of Roadsters, according to What’s Inside’s video.
Now, if you are familiar with What’s Inside, you know that they tend to cut through things to find out what’s inside them, but obviously, Dan won’t be doing that with these Roadsters. The video is still a great look at what could be some of the best-preserved Roadsters on the planet.
Also, we now learn how much O’Dowd paid for the Roadsters.
Carl Medlock of Medlock and Sons, an independent Tesla repair shop, helped O’Dowd in the purchase and confirmed that the billionaire paid $800,000 for the three Roadsters.
That’s well below the up to $2 million offers that Gruber teased. In fact, Medlock claims that the only other big serious offer was for $500,000.
Regardless, at an average of over $250,000 per Roadster, it makes them some of the most valuable Roadsters to date.
Author: Fred Lambert
Source: Electrek
