Billionaire Buys Three Lost-and-Found Roadsters Despite Posing As Tesla's Biggest Hater

The three of them ended up in the hands of an expert known as "Doctor Roadster" of Wedlock & Sons. He worked for Tesla when it rolled out the first-generation Roadster. But these three that he is working on to restore are unique examples that were never driven by anyone outside Tesla and never owned by anyone.

Two of them are orange and the third is painted red. The cars were offered in an auction, but the results were never public. It turns out that they were sold in a private deal.

All three cars, plus one that was in parts, were bought by the same person, whose identity remained undisclosed until now. The owner is tech billionaire Dan O'Dowd, an entrepreneur who sells software to military customers. But why would he buy so many Teslas if he has been posing as Tesla's biggest hater for years?

During the Super Bowl, he ran a commercial to show the dangers of Tesla's FSD, and he has been continuously lashing Elon Musk and his abilities. He is also behind the Dawn Project, which has been highlighting the failures of the Tesla software and the risk it poses to traffic participants.

However, Dan O'Dowd owns several Teslas, with these three roadsters, plus the one dissembled included, and two more Roadsters that he has in storage in California. He also owns two Model 3s and his wife drives the Model S. After he bought the Roadsters lost for 12 years, he took them to Carl Wedlock to fix them up.

The story of the three roadsters dates back 13 years ago. They were purchased by an engineering firm that wanted to ship them from the US to China to disassemble them and see what Tesla was doing in terms of technology, hoping to use whatever they discovered in the cars they were working on at the time.

But once they arrived in China, they were detained by the government. They remained in their shipping containers for 12 whole years until they were sent back to the US.

One of them drove 104 miles because Tesla used to test every new car for 100 miles to make sure everything was working the right way. That was the last time they were driven: The battery is down to zero range, which means those batteries are gone and lost forever. Data collected from the ECU of one of the orange Roadsters shows that the battery of one of the cars has been dead since December 4, 2011.

The other orange car displays serious paint damage on the front bumper, which is also bent, probably from the expansion of the protective material inside the container over all these years. Meanwhile, the carbon fiber parts seem cracked.

The rubber of the tires cracked, too, so there's one more reason these cars can't be driven.

The three roadsters are the only ones in the world that have never been titled and the only ones with zero owners before Dan O'Dowd bought them. Carl thinks that Dan is not going to title them but just put them in some museum.

Each of the roadsters was $125,000 when new, with optional equipment taking them to $160,000.