We are always honored when an exceptionally important Roadster like this Founders Series VIN 10 arrives at our Service Center.   It is a very rare color – Signature Green, a cross between green and blue with metal flake.

This is one of Tesla’s earliest surviving production cars, and it represents a remarkable snapshot of the company’s very first chapter.

In fact, this very early Tesla Roadster was not built in the USA, but in Hethel, United Kingdom by the original Lotus team, before Tesla began building Roadsters in the United States. Its VIN beginning with SFZRE is a key clue to its origin, identifying it as a European-manufactured car from that first historic phase of production.  The “F” in the VIN identifies this as a Founders Series Roadster.

As a Founders Series car, VIN 10 would typically have been reserved for someone closely connected to Tesla in the early days — often venture capitalists, family members, founders, early employees, or other insiders who helped launch the company. These were not ordinary production cars. They were delivered to the people who were part of Tesla’s origin story.

This car is also full of rare early-production details that reinforce its pedigree. The windshield has an embedded Tesla logo, indicating it is one of the original European-produced windshields used before later examples were sourced in the United States. Even more subtle is the small watermark logo visible in the PPF on the front hood vane, a detail found only on the early Hethel-built cars. We have seen this same uncommon feature on Tesla Roadster VIN 5, another Hethel UK car in our collection.

This special Roadster also came to us from a museum collection, but unfortunately it arrived bricked and completely dead. We replaced the battery to bring the car back to life, and it will now move through a careful program of deferred maintenance, upgrades, and restoration work to preserve its originality while returning it to proper operating condition.

Cars like this do not come along often. Founders Series VIN 10 is not just an early Roadster — it is a highly significant artifact from Tesla’s startup era, when the company was still small, the cars were still being hand-built in Hethel, and every surviving detail carried part of the story forward.

With its extraordinary provenance, early European construction, museum history, rare Hethel-only details, and restoration now underway, this special Founders car is destined to become a highly sought-after collectible.