Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasoncartwright | Hacker News Reader

This chap is very impressive, and pretty crazy - spending tens (hundreds?) of thousands of $ on apparently unserviceable cars, then opening up the high voltage systems on them with no help from the manufacturer.

His YouTube channel is here https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfV0_wbjG8KJADuZT2ct4SA

View on HN

>spending tens (hundreds?) of thousands of $ on apparently unserviceable cars, then opening up the high voltage systems on them with no help from the manufacturer.

Once you get to the level at which you're comfortable working on any one of the subsystems alone there's a snowball effect. Rebuilding a flooded car isn't fundamentally harder than any individual repair. It's just a bigger job. It's mostly a question of available resources (space and cash flow being the two most common bottlenecks) and motivation.

Fair point

>pending tens (hundreds?) of thousands of $ on apparently unserviceable cars

If you read the article, his net cost for the one Tesla he drives was $6500. This is because he bought two junked cars for about $30k, assembled the one "Good" car out of the combined parts, then was able to resell the remaining duplicate good parts for the difference.

That's great, but at the start he had no idea if he would ever and up with a working car or recoup any cost at all. I don't know how rich I'd need to be to bet $30k on a broken car.

It's a fine line between

> bet $30k on a broken car

and spending $30k on your "hobby". I think it's just a shift in mindset.

If you've been following him for a while on YouTube then you'd know he's bought more than just taking the risk on the two Teslas mentioned in the article, including a $70,000 Model X.

There's another guy that bought a chiped frame Audi TT and reworked it. It was a bit impressive, also his soldering + reinforcement didn't inspire confidence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com