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Last week we opened our first ever Tesla Store in Los Angeles on Santa Monica Blvd.
The Tesla Roadster is a revolutionary car and our Tesla Stores will be no less revolutionary as an automotive retail experience.
Store Front
What’s so different? Well, pretty much everything, but here’s the main idea. We want to create welcoming spaces, where our guests feel comfortable and in their element. And we want to create a sense of unity about the whole operation where there’s no wall of separation between the showroom and service.
One of the very first things you’ll notice about our new store is that the service area is side-by-side with the showroom and connected to it in a very open way. Service actually has the bigger window onto Santa Monica Blvd. Electric cars are cleaner around the shop. Less oil, no fumes. We knew our service area would be a showpiece, so we figured: why not put it out front where everyone can see? Plus, it just fits with our feeling that more public transparency is a good thing.
Showroom
Service Area
The same is true in a way with the showroom experience. In the traditional car-buying world, the object of the seller is control.
Control of information and control of you, from the minute you get on the lot until you finally pull yourself free. As a manufacturer, our approach will be radically different. We feel it’s our job to build products that you fall in love with. So when you come to the Tesla Store we want to be completely transparent and be as accommodating as possible.We like to think it’s our job to get out of the way and let the car do the talking, then help out wherever we can. In that kind of environment, you have the space to decide for yourself if this is the right car for you.
Look for our next store to open at Stanford in the San Francisco Bay Area this summer.
Congratulations with this very important milestone! Looking forward to your first store in Europe!
Very cool, hopefully history will look to this as the day the electric car began its inevitable takeover.
Looking forward to the bay area store.
Tom,
When , if ever, do you anticipate that you will be selling cars from the showroom rather than taking orders in advance. Do you anticipate that you will be selling Whitestars from the show room or will they also be special order only vehicles as well. Will Roadsters continue to be special order only cars for the near future - meaning a year or two ? and if so do you anticipate the same time frames for the Whitestar ? ie 2-4 years of waiting before you can walk in and buy one and walk out with it.
In the soon future there will be lots of Roadsters getting their electronics and tranmission switched out in the window.
Is there any word out about exacty where the Tesla store in South Florida will be? Miami?
congrats
hope you soon open more of them 
Congratulations, Tom. I hope to have the chance to come visit next time I’m on the left coast. I really like the idea of being able to see the service department. Some of the new Harley stores in the area are doing that as well.
Stanford? When did that stretch of El Camino secede? It’ll always be Menlo Park to me.
Although Tesla currently sells an electric only vehicle, when the future vehicles roll out and they have a range extender, I would imagine that the service area will begin getting to look a little more like other vehicle repair shops. I’m not sure that would bode well for having the service area qute so open.
Congratulations, the place looks awesome!! I do have a few questions, though.
I know you expect the service area to be fairly clean, and as such it allows you to have “no wall of separation” between it and the showroom. But can’t it still get rather loud, say from the occasional dropped wrench, or from pneumatic tools, etc.. Don’t you want at least a glass barrier? I suppose, however, you guys have plenty of experience from noise level at the San Carlos shop.
How do you plan to deal with the oil mess and fumes that will come from the ICE range extender in the REEV version of the Whitestar?
With regard to the Menlo Park store, will it be more difficult to connect the showroom with the service area given that the existing structure is from a traditional dealership?
And finally, will I be able to come visit the Menlo Park store when it’s finally open??
Thanks!!
Again if anyone’s interested to see some shots of the Menlo Park location including some old aerial photos you can go here and keep scrolling down:
www.teslamotorsclub.com/tesla-motors/644-menlo-park-sales-service-center.html#post7735
Rick,
The land (like much of it around the campus) is owned by Stanford University. Though, perhaps Tom meant to say “near Stanford” rather than “at” it.
Actually, the Stanford land issue suggests another question:
How long will a Tesla store stay at that Menlo Park location (since Stanford plans to eventually redevelop that entire strip of land from the Stanford Park Hotel to the Menlo Station shopping center)?
Just wanted to say congrats of the store opening and expanded venture in Europe. Just saw the piece on history channel about Nikola Tesla , was very skeptical how history channel would characterize him , but was satisfied seeing they took a lot of info from the biography Wizard . Was very pleased especially that they showed the Tesla Roadster at the end of the program . Just wish they had done this sooner and i think this program should be shown in schools all over the country. Maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel for our future and changing peoples perspective of the world today to help prevent anymore of our human follies in control of energy resources . I supect as the result of the tesla roadster , the establishment had to eventually let the cat out of the bag as to where the things we take for granted came from .. Thanks so much for what you guys are trying to do and may your journey continue .. LONG LIVE TESLA
Great news! Congratulations to this milestone. We actively follow the development of your cars on our Green Car Network.
Hope an affordable car (Whitestar) will be in the showrooms soon.
I hope there are plans for a service center in the Washington DC area!
Neat interior design.
Kinda looks more like a bar than a car store
Tom,
You said “we want to be completely transparent and be as accommodating as possible”. So how about answering our questions on this blog ?!?!?! Is that not included in being transparent ?!?!?! If the posters of these blogs can’t answer certain questions then an answer should be given that “I can’t answer that at this time” but to simply ignore us is far from transparent and doing everything possible to accomodate us. Hopefully more responses will be made in the future. ” I don’t know” or “I cant answer that” are acceptable answers but still should be given.
Cool new store! I’ll take a grande americano with an extra shot, please.
When is Chicago coming?
Rumor now has it that 5 Roadsters have been delivered to their owners. Can TM confirm this statement was in fact made by Darryl Siry. I do not want anything to be misquoted Darryl and I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt to respond yourself. Hopefully a response will be forth coming
Thomas J.,
TM has said in the past that there are plans for a Washington DC store - and relatively soon - but they have not indicated a time frame for that. I too am in the DC area so I am looking forward to it ASAP
So when are you going to tell us about your capital raising efforts? The press release concerning Larry W. Sonsini suggests that you are planning an IPO. How about making us the second to know (after customers who put down a deposit). I assume that you are seeking funds to continue work on the white star? Having shareholders that really believe in your mission as most of the readers here do, would be an asset to your company.
Mark,
I have to agree with you it seems that TM is putting its fans here from the blogs on the very back burner if not completely out of the kitchen. I totally understand that the OWNERS should know first but I think they could at least try to post things here at the same time as the press releases. Seems this is the LAST place I get information. So it will be interesting to see if anything starts to change on these blogs or whether we just pass them up and move on to better sources of information.
Kevin -
I’m not sure where the quote was from but i recently told a crowd of folks that the 5th car is on the line. We are about to do a program update to customers that points that out and mentions that #6 and 7 are getting started as well. The update will be posted on this blog immediately after it is sent to customers.
There is no intention to keep the folks on the blog in the dark - it is just a matter of resources. Of course we try to keep customers first, but with things the way they are with the interweb these days we post things right after they are sent to customers. I will soon hire a resource to “mind the store” more frequently on this and other blogs and keep our website more up to date, but right now it is very hard to spend the time with everything else going on.
Still, this blog is not a Q&A forum so please don’t expect that any question posted here will receive a response. We will do the best we can to answer questions and address issues.
One thing you might want to do is subscribe to the RSS feed from the twitter account “teslamotors”. We post things there as well occasionally.
Darryl
From all accounts, Tesla stores will be selling BEVs exclusively for at least the next two or three years. That’s more than enough time to build brand awareness and the excitement of potential customers via the present store “model.” In the run-up to introduction for any vehicle equipped with range-extender, there will be plenty of time to either retrofit the service areas of the existing Tesla Stores, or to move to different locations that feature completely redesigned and re-situated service areas. Frankly, I am hoping that advances in energy storage technology will arrive in time to head off any substantial push into range-extenders. I can understand that Tesla may feel as if RE is a necessary tactic for the near-term future, given the current state of technology and the current bias of the marketplace. But we seem to be at an interesting cusp: many things can change in the next couple of years. Good for Tesla for keeping not only their minds but also their options open. But even better if their cars won’t actually have to depend on REs for very long, if ever.
Has anybody heard anything about EEStor, lately? It would be great if they would finally start delivering this year. But if they don’t, or even if they or another company NEVER delivers appropriate ultracapacitors, advances we have read about and discussed on these blogs recently promise to lower cost and increase capacity and longevity of batteries, perhaps as soon as in the next several years. (It only took Toshiba two years to bring their SuperCharge LiIon batteries to market, for instance, and they are already working on capacity improvements that will make the SuperCharge line more suitable for automotive use.)
Will you guys be serving rum cream? You can talk me into pretty much anything if you keep the rum creams coming!
Darryl,
Thanks for the post back. It REALLY is appreciated when you can get back to us and simply talk to us. I know that your schedule must be EXTREMELY hectic right now with tons of stuff going on. I think that hiring a person to attend to the blogs is a GREAT idea. I am hoping that the blogs might begin to turn more to a Q & A thing as production ramps up. Hopefully with an additional employee that might happen. Seems to follow the pattern of moving from development to actual sales. Program update was FANTASTIC !!!!! Posting more here after it is sent to the OWNERS is a WONDERFUL idea. In this day and age of the internet we seem to demand more and more instantaneous answers and I am sure that it can be very time consuming and overwhelming but it is GREATLY appreciated.