Buying your way into the exclusive Tesla owner’s club in Australia gets you a ticket to some pretty cool events — albeit at a pretty significant six-figure price tag. After a social drive day from Sydney to the historic Hydro Majestic in the Blue Mountains and a Victorian meet at a petrol station without petrol, a third Aussie event was a movie screening at the company’s Melbourne showroom — a drive-in movie.
Aussie owners in the area congregated at the Richmond service centre and showroom to watch Racing Extinction, with a projector displaying the film on one of the service centre workshop’s two-storey tall walls and with audio piped directly into the assembled fleet of 16 Tesla Model S sedans over the FM radio band — just like a proper drive-in. The screen might not be massive, but it clearly got the job done.
The choice of film is appropriate for Tesla’s target market; Racing Extinction is a documentary about the Anthropocene Extinction caused by man-made global warming and poaching, pointing to carbon dioxide and methane emissions from public and private transportation as one of the major factors.
Tesla planned the drive-in event internally, but also has an official owner’s club which runs its own events; another drive-in is likely for the future due to keen customer interest. More all-electric owner events are on the cards for Tesla Australia owners including track days, Supercharger “rallies” and club drives to Destination Charger locations around the country.
Here’s a clip from Racing Extinction that showcases Tesla’s efforts to build an all-electric vehicle, titled ‘Creating A Better Car’, with some pretty incredible technology — like a self-obscuring licence plate and a thermal-imaging camera in the front trunk — added on: