It’s happening. 50 miles away is a 2019 Tesla Model 3 sitting in a parking lot with some battle scars and a salvage title.
We picked this up at auction through Copart for $5,100. It’s blue. It’s dented in a way we like – our 11th owner 924s has a matching dent on the drivers side. Beyond that we know it was involved in some frontal collision but the airbags didn’t deploy and it doesn’t look like there are any HV battery messages…so we may be able to save it.
The Lemons Math
For those unfamiliar, 24 Hours of Lemons has a strict $500 budget for your race car. Spend more and the judges will penalize you with BS Factor lap deductions. The whole point is cheap, terrible cars doing endurance racing.
But Lemons wants EVs on track. So they created a rule specifically to encourage it: all EV drive-system components — batteries, motors, controllers, chargers, connectors, and cables — don’t count toward the $500 limit. And if the first full EV wins a Lemons race outright, they get $50,000. In nickels. Delivered by dump truck.
So how does a $5,100 purchase get us under $500? Two things working in our favor.
First, the most valuable components in this car — the battery pack and drive units — are completely exempt from the budget. Per Lemons Rule 3.12.4.1, those don’t count. For a salvage Tesla, the battery and motors represent the vast majority of the car’s value.Just the batteries, undamaged start around $2500. Motors are around $2k for the pair. See where this is going?
Second, we can sell the OEM parts we don’t need for racing. A Lemons car doesn’t need luxury seats, a 15″ touchscreen, electronic door handles, trunk latch or even headlights. And Tesla OEM parts hold their value well on eBay. Here’s what the low end of the market looks like right now for used 2019 Model 3 parts:
- Headlights (pair): ~$500
- 15″ touchscreen display + MCU: ~$300
- Front seats (pair): ~$300
- Rear seat set: ~$100
- OEM door handles (set of 4): ~$200
- Tail lights (pair): ~$200
- Side mirrors (pair): ~$150
- Panoramic roof glass: ~$300
- Airbag modules (driver, passenger, side curtain): ~$300
- Miscellaneous interior trim, panels, switches: ~$200
Conservative total from parts sales: ~$2,550
Take the $5,100 purchase price, subtract the exempt EV drivetrain value (which is most of the car’s worth), subtract ~$2,550 in sellable parts, and the effective cost of the non-exempt stuff we’re actually racing with — the dented body, the chassis, the suspension, the wheels — lands comfortably under $500. We may even have some money left for go-faster parts like more cooling for the motors and battery. We’ll be tracking every receipt and every sale, obviously. The Lemons judges love receipts.
What’s Next
We’re right at the beginning of figuring out what needs to be done. The car comes with a salvage certificate, which means it’s not road legal yet so there are some basic fixes to do, just to be able to drive it around.
We’ll share the whole process — getting it repaired, registered, and eventually race-ready. Stay tuned.
Outrun Carbon 