Over the holidays, the "Revenge" team spent time filming with Greg "Gadget"  Abbott as he moved into a cavernous new warehouse space in downtown LA. Gadget runs an electric car conversion company called Left Coast Electric.   He's also the star of the TV shows "Smash Lab" and "Monster House"- where he's shown millions of viewers how to build eye-popping structures from the most unlikely materials.  Gadget's motto is : "If you think it can't be done, then you're talking to the wrong people!" Gadget made a barnstorming appearance in "Who Killed the Electric Car?" and he's taking a bigger role in "Revenge."  That's partly because Gadget's new 2000 square foot shop is being built out of the ashes of his old shop in Culver City.  Late last year,  Gadget's workshop was destroyed in a fire.   The blaze took away some of Gadget's most prized work, including a super sleek electric powered Silver Porsche which featured at PlugInAmerica's Sept 08 gala fundraiser alongside the Tesla Roadster and GM's Volt prototype.  Most people would have been knocked flat by such a turn of events, but the fire seems to have made Gadget and his wife, Charlotte, even more determined to push for a plug-in future. As befits a man with ten Guinness World Records under his belt, (including the world's largest electric guitar), Gadget's rising to the challenge.   As 2009 progresses, we'll be at Gadget and Charlotte's side as they rebuild their lives.  Stage One is transforming an abandoned LA warehouse and rebuilding his silver electric Porsche into a scalable production vehicle.   Stay tuned...

Our co-producer continues her account of shooting behind the scenes at Tesla. As we captured key meetings with department heads,  Elon stressed his commitment to ramping Tesla up - and the fact that his role was hands-on. He reminded person after person that no problem or detail was too small. The buck stopped with Elon.

 We pulled a marathon day, and our cameraman, Adam, worked valiantly to keep up.  Filming meetings is actually difficult to do well. You need to know the subject, know the players, and then make split-second decisions as to how to follow the action. Along the way, we captured a couple of job interviews and captured Elon's policy of interviewing most employees in person. One of our interviews was a young engineer. When asked about the recent layoffs he said "You have to cut your burn rate. It's just the way business works — for start-ups especially." A couple of Tuesdays later, I took a cameraman back to witness an "all hands meeting" at Tesla's Menlo Park office. Again, the back warehouse was full with cars about to be delivered. This time, we saw cars approaching VIN number 100.  Elon voiced his displeasure with an internal issue that had been passed on to the press by an employee.   Then a slide show came on, and we got a sneak peak at a photo of 'Model S'. OMG.  I don't usually think of sedans as sexy, but this car is gorgeous.  If and when this happens, Tesla will have trouble keeping them in stock at any price point.  My family of five might just have to be first in line.

Let me just give it away now….the first day we filmed this fall at Tesla, we got to see not one, not two, not three, but, and I counted—over 40 production Roadsters in the Menlo Park buildings. There is something about the sight of more than four million dollars of incredibly sleek, fast (they do look fast - even standing still) car flesh under one roof that really makes you tingle.