Extract from a chat with Simon Hackett
The Owner of the first Tesla in Australoa
So what made you go out and hang it all out there and buy an electric EV little in a roadster almost 15 years ago now?
Well it turns out Rosco, that story starts probably another 10 years before that. There was a car in the 90s called the GM EV1, a kind of famous car in the history of EVs. It was the coming of EVs before the current era and I was spending a fair bit of time in California and some friends of mine over there had two of these things. These are the cars that, if you haven’t seen it, there’s a great documentary called Who Cooled the Electric Car that’s about this right?
But General Motors were forced under sufferance by the California Air Resources Board of all things to try to clean up the air in Los Angeles. So they were effectively economically strong armed to build some EVs. They didn’t, really didn’t want to do it, but what they forgot to do is they forgot to tell the engineers to build a bad car. The engineer at the time actually built an awesome car. It was like this thing out of the Jetsons and my friends in California handed me the pin code for it because it didn’t even have a key and said, “Come back in a few days.”
I came back a convert in the mid 90s to the idea that EVs were the future of cars and it wasn’t about saving the planet. I mean for them it was about air quality, but it was even that car, which by modern standards is not a very high spec vehicle, right, running on lead acid batteries.
It was still this fantastic driving experience that anyone that’s driven an EV understands that they’re just better things to drive. I was driving the future and the commitment I made to myself then and there Rosco in the mid 90s was I would buy an electric car from the first person who could sell me an EV that didn’t sell it. It was that simple.
And in 2006, I think it was, I found myself at a technology conference in the US that I regularly go to. And there was this young guy called Elon Musk speaking there, mostly about SpaceX, but he had this Word document, two page Word document with words and a computer generated picture of how cool the Roadster was going to be if they built it. And I could see in his eyes that he was not going to fail. Failure is not an option. So I pulled up to him after he’d spoken and said, Hey, if I order one of these cars and ship it to Australia, is that like, is that all right?
He said, something along the lines of, if you can deal with the obvious servicing challenges, you go right ahead.
So I ordered one, right? I ordered what turned out to be Roadster number 186. It was delivered in 2008, nine time timeframe. And I had no idea what I was going to do with it, Rosco, because it was a left hand drive California spec vehicle.