The genesis of Electrified Garage was such
that a lot of people started reaching out to me because
of the YouTube channel. People that want to get
issues resolved with their Teslas. And at the time, Tesla was super
busy, they didn't have time to get people in for appointments. When many owners try to schedule
a service appointment, the service centers are stretched thin and appointments
could be weeks out before a car gets in for service. So they started reaching out to me and
saying, 'hey Tesla is too busy to take a look at this,' or 'I own
a savaged vehicle can you take a look at my electric vehicle?' So this is a personal
car that I'm working on. This is my car and this
was in a side collision. My name's Rich and I run
a YouTube channel called Rich Rebuilds. Hey guys, Rich with Rich Rebuilds here
and today I'm going to tell you all what's wrong with my
salvaged flooded Tesla Model S. The reason why I start my YouTube
channel was to kind of demystify Teslas in general. So I purchased the Tesla Model S a
few years ago and I started taking it apart to see if I
could actually put it back together. Main screen, the door
handles are presenting. This is off to a good start. This car really has a special place
in my heart because this is the first one that I rebuilt. This is Dolores my first
completed flood Tesla project. If you guys haven't heard the story on
this as yet, I found a Tesla that was in a salt water flood
and spent six months merging two cars together to bring this
one back to life. At the time there was a
lot of mystery around the cars. Tesla wasn't really sharing much information
about them in terms of what's inside of them
and how they worked. So I figured to myself, people
may actually be interested in this. So as I started tearing into the
car more and more, I started taking detailed photos of
things, detailed videos. This blue connector goes
back in the door. And just kind of
took off from there. I recently had a subscriber
reach out to me. He reached out to me and said,
'Hey Car Guru, I need help. I need to install additional seating in
my Tesla Model S and a service center local to me will
not do it for me. Can you help me?' I said absolutely. The channel has been gaining
an insane amount of traction. Thank you. Since then I've gained
a small cult-like following. Someone printed my face on
a hundred dollar bill. This is the wall clock
someone made for me. Someone sent me that poster
of Elon Musk over there. It's a life sized. See that long like
weird paper thing? Yeah. There we go. So after the YouTube channel started
gaining more and more traction, I reached out to my friend Chris and
Chris and I just said to ourselves we got to start something. This is a huge market here. Let's help people out as
much as we can. I know how to rebuild a car. Chris has the parts to do it and
he has the contacts to actually reach out to those people to get
the things that we need. And let's just do something. Chris was like, 'you know
I could run with this.' You know he's he's built shops
before from the ground up. I started with Tesla in January of 2013
and at the time I was looking for something new. I was looking to get away from a
desk job and get back to working with my hands and working on cars. So about four and a half years in,
I was part of one of the restructurings that happened
at Tesla. And at that point, I decided, well you
know, I can go and find another job and not necessarily be happy or
I can do what I've been thinking about for a while which was to start
Ev Tuning and do my own thing and be my own boss. Ev Tuning is more
of an online presence. It's a place to go and order parts
where you as a DIY person can install them yourself. Either repair your own door handle,
install your own center console, vinyl wrap or, you know, order a set
of wheels and tires and we can ship them to your house and
you can install them yourself. Where Electrified Garage comes into play
is for that person that doesn't have mechanical ability or frankly doesn't
have the time or the aptitude to do so. We're in a startup scrappy
phase at this moment. We're just like Amazon or Google
or any other startup company that started in a garage. You know, we're literally in a two
car garage right now and the Electrified Garage is gonna be built
adjacent to that in a larger space. So over there is gonna be the HVAC. Yup. The wheel and tire machines are
gonna go over in this corner here. The alignment machine will be going
in this bay on this side. There'll be another lift on this side and
then in the front will be an area just to work on the car if
it doesn't need to be jacked up. Seventy percent of what you do with a
Tesla doesn't need to be up in the air. It's mostly stuff inside the car. Hey Rich. Hey, how's it going? How you doing man? How have you been? Great, good to see you. Good to see you too. What's she in here for today? Well I gotta tell you, I think
I'm having a problem with this. I believe it's this sensor. OK. It's not quite picking it up when
I'm parking and I just wanted to have you guys take a look at it. Sure we'll take a look at it. No problem Super. Thanks man. I had a really well known problem
with door handles presenting and not. And these guys had put together
a door handle assemblies that used better quality parts, if you will,
than what the manufacturer was offering at the time. And had replacements done with that. And I had a one of the sensor
units had gone awry and they had taken care of those things for me. We pretty much have been booked every
Saturday for over a year now. With appointments for customers to come
in from anything from getting their breaks replaced, to a door
handle fixed, or winter wheels and tires put on their
car, dash camera installs. Right now it's just. Yup, just the two of us. Just us. And we both actually have full time jobs
too so this is really a, it's really a struggle at times. There really is no Tesla presence up
north and here's the oasis of Teslatude a mere 40 miles away. So the facility that we're building now
that's next to EV Tuning is actually in a residential area. But Seabrook as a town is kind
of unique in that they allow other businesses to open and operate
in a residential area. So it's kind of like
a mixed commercial and residential. There's actually three other garages within a
mile of where we are that all operate out of
essentially their house. Electric vehicles don't
make any noise. They don't make any smells. You know it's not like a traditional
garage where you're gonna hear all kinds of loud banging and
that kind of stuff. For all intensive purposes, we probably
could have said nothing and nobody would have even known
that we were here. I think the Tesla struggles as far as
being able to service cars in a timely manner for a
couple of reasons. The biggest one is obviously it costs
a lot of money to open service centers. You have to buy
or outfit an existing location. You need to hire
employees and train them. And so that makes it
difficult to do that quickly. And there's so many other aspects of
the company that need to be ramped up at the same time. That's not necessarily an area
that you can focus on. Tesla has tried to stem some of
that by offering ranger service or mobile service, as they call it now. Where it's basically a technician in a
van that has parts and tools and they go to your house and fix stuff. But still, even at that, there's
only two service centers in New England and they're both
close to Boston. So if you're in Maine, Vermont or
New Hampshire your choice is drive three or four hours for work to be
done in your car or somebody has to come to you. You can easily be three, four or
five weeks out in some instances in order to get your
car in for service. We're hoping that the demand is really
strong and we're hoping to grow this into more of a franchise
type business and almost work alongside Tesla to actually repair a lot
of their vehicles as well. Because at this point they need
all the help they can get. We haven't. I haven't at least no. No I haven't. Yeah. They kind of. They tend to stay away from us. Usually when anything comes out they
kind of say well what they're doing is, kind of their own thing
and then they're giving us too much attention so. I personally like him. I think he's a brilliant guy. Super smart. Driven. He's fostered
a great company. He has his issues of course
but I think he's a genius. Yes. There's no doubt about it. I would agree as a whole, I think
he wants to do the right thing and he's definitely pushing the rest of the
industry to do the right thing as well. A lot of people are super excited to
get these brand new cars and when they do there is a minor issue with it,
it takes you a month or two to get back into the system to get the
car repaired and kind of leaves a bad taste in a
lot of people's mouths. So our goal was to say to ourselves,
you know what how can we build something to help this company? And that's what we're trying to do.
