Secret Stash of Rare Tesla Roadster EVs Found in Various States of Disrepair

With only 2,450 first-gen Tesla Roadster EVs built during its 2008-2012 production life, calling them rare is an understatement. With perpetual delays leaving the next-gen Tesla Roadster somewhere in “the future,” the originals have only become more coveted. So you can imagine the astonishment of finding no fewer than six of them unceremoniously crammed together behind a Tesla store in Owings Mills, Maryland.

Today, there’s no mention of the Roadster inside Tesla stores, and it’s not even listed as an option when searching used inventory online. A quick examination revealed these six weren’t for sale, either. None had window stickers, some were damaged, and all of them were dirty. Registration stickers indicated many of them had been off the road for at least two or three years.

With an MSRP that started at $98,950 and steadily grew each year, Roadsters have never been cheap. When prices on the collector market began ticking up in 2021, Hagerty even included the car on its Bull Market List. Now the cars easily fetch more than $100,000 at auction, making it odd that Tesla would just leave them here to collect pine needles. A technician noticed me inspecting the lot and stopped to confirm my suspicions: These were parts cars.

Nobody at the store would speak on the record, but the technician, who refused to give their name, shared that the Owings Mills store has become something of a hub for Roadster service on the East Coast. They have one co-worker who is “the Roadster guy,” who loves working on these cars.

“The challenge is,” they tech explained, “most of the original technicians who were with Tesla, who knew how to work on these, are all millionaires now. They’ve all left the company.” They told me that Tesla used generous stock benefits to lure service technicians from rival dealerships when setting up its own service centers. When the stock price soared in the late 2010s, it created a windfall for employees and a wave of early retirements. “It’s awesome that we have someone with deep knowledge of these products going back really far,” they said. “He’s chosen to stick around because he likes the cars and likes the work.”

The tech said that owners from surrounding states bring their Roadsters hundreds of miles to Maryland for repairs. As the oldest “modern” EV, the Roadster shows firsthand the challenges of keeping aging electric cars roadworthy. Plastic parts break, body panels get damaged, and electronic systems go wonky. Battery cells can die, the pack can lose its ability to hold a charge, or the whole system can just brick itself and quit working.

Because the Roadster is based on a Lotus Elise chassis and assembled with components sourced from around the world, finding parts is a challenge. Tesla modified the cars so heavily that most off-the-shelf Lotus components won’t work, and Tesla has long since stopped producing new parts, leaving service centers with one choice: kill the weak to save the strong. “We keep these cars and parasitically break them down, certify the parts, and then use those to repair the Roadsters that are still in service on the road,” the technician said.

According to Gruber Motors, one of the largest third-party repairers of Tesla vehicles, Tesla quietly began buying back Roadsters in late 2019, and the company recommitted to Roadster service in a mass email to owners later that year. Tesla service centers around the country began creating miniature stockpiles of Roadsters to use for parts. This info coincides with the state registration stickers on the cars I saw, most of which were from 2019-2021. Paperwork left inside the cars indicated most were trade-ins (though I can’t imagine trading an original Roadster for a Model 3 would be very satisfying). Sadly, none of these six will likely see the highway again. Check out the gallery below to see the various states of disrepair.

“The first thing that we do with these is remove the high-power, high-voltage battery on the bottom,” the anonymous tech said. “Tesla headquarters in Fremont requests that all of those battery packs come back to them so that they can refurbish, reservice, and recycle.” From there, parts are stripped away on an as-needed basis. The tech wouldn’t specify what the high-demand items are, but they did say the process takes time.

“It’s like a Costco rotisserie chicken,” they said. “You eat what you like the first day and then put it in the fridge. And you keep picking away at it until there’s nothing left but bones and scraps.” Once the cars are truly picked clean, the Owings Mills service center sells the aluminum chassis to a metal recycler. Compared to the dozens of Tesla 3, Y, S, and X models they service every day, it’s a very small part of their business. The tech said they work on a Roadster maybe once every two months.

Looking through the miniature EV boneyard, I noticed the subtle differences between the Roadster’s iterations. There were regular and Sport models, hard tops and soft tops, lever shifters and push-button shifters. The cars featured different wheels, badges, and colors. At least one had undergone the R80 battery upgrade.

Joe Ligo is an automotive historian and producer of The Last Independent Automaker, a documentary series about the history of American Motors Corporation.