Tesla employee car meet series

From mid-2011 to late 2012 I lived in southern California, home of the original Cars and Coffee meet. I can’t claim to have been there from the start - I never attended at the original Crystal Cove location - but nearly every Saturday morning I woke up early and made the pilgrimage to the Mazda USA headquarters in Irvine. For the uninitiated, Cars and Coffee (“C&C”) was a new type of social car event, casual and welcoming to all types of vehicles.

In 2013 I moved to San Francisco and joined Tesla. While C&C events had spread across the US and abroad, there was no such event in the Bay Area. I believed that Tesla had a unique opportunity to host such an event, with a large parking lot at the factory in Fremont, and I saw the potential to attract car enthusiasts to the Tesla brand and simply learn more about the Model S, which was new at the time. I assembled a simple slide deck and pitched the idea to the marketing team.

Unfortunately the idea never took off. There wasn’t strong buy-in from the powers-that-be and eventually Tesla was building cars seven days a week and the parking lot was rarely and sporadically empty. There was also a certain liability associated with hosting public guests and vehicles on the company’s property.

Not to be discouraged, I took note of the exciting cars I saw parked at the office and how many genuine “car people” I worked with. Holding a smaller meet, only for employees and their families, solved a lot of problems: the guests were all members of the Tesla community, the crowd would be smaller, and that opened up satellite Tesla locations (such as the engineering office in Palo Alto) that were available on weekends. So, with the blessing of the head of engineering, I worked with facilities to have a small gathering. The first couple of meets were in the Fremont factory parking lot. An employee’s cousin had a food truck, and parked on-site to serve breakfast options.

After three of these grassroots meets, HR took notice and we teamed up to make the events bigger and better. With a small budget we were able to provide coffee and donuts, and facilities helped with a PA system so we could play music and hold a raffle. I asked around and we pulled some big favors to get some exciting raffle prizes - two stand out in particular. One was a ride-along in a prototype Model 3 (when that car was still in development); the other was a diecast Model S signed by Elon. The meets were open to all employees, any types of cars, motorcycles, bikes, scooters, I think we might have had a boat once. I loved organizing these events and it gave me an opportunity to meet people at Tesla whom I would not have met otherwise. I left behind a detailed ‘playbook’ when I left Tesla, but I don’t know if anyone has carried the torch since my departure.