We all love a good project car story. It’s delightful hearing about that restored MG or the track-reborn Miata. This is a story about a Tesla Model S.




It all started in January 2016, when YouTuber Car Guru purchased a flooded black Tesla Model S for $14,000. He named it Dolores and it became his project car. He pulled pretty much everything out of Dolores. The parts that he didn’t need or were still usable he sold. In fact, he actually made enough money back on Dolores’ parts that he pretty much broke even with how much he paid for it.

Over the course of the next few months, he bought several different salvage Model Ss, stripped them of parts he needed and sold the rest. He figured out how to reassemble everything and built up Dolores again. It’s actually fascinating how he was to suture everything together. Here’s a video from a few days ago outlining all of his costs.

Car Guru asserts that he wasn’t willing to buy a used Model S, CPO or not. He enjoys tinkering around with cars. It’s a hobby. And at the end of six months, he’d have a working car instead of not really anything of value, like other hobbyists.


Yesterday, he published another video, which began normally enough. He needed to install an underbody tray and left Dolores plugged in, charging, while he did it. And as he was talking, the Tesla started smoking! Oh, no!

In the video’s caption, he admitted that he should have known better than to work on the car while it was plugged in. He said that we can expect a follow-up video that will explore precisely what went wrong.

You can see more of the build process leading up to this video here.

[UPDATE] Many of you pointed out in the comments that this video might be a hoax. Gold stars all around if you caught it! Car Guru said in his follow-up reveal video that he wanted to make something for all of his haters, including a few who think it’s appropriate to sling racist slurs at people. So, even though we were fooled, we’re still happy to be counted among his mourning fans.

(h/t to Mark!)