Hi. This is Verity.
She's been my dream car, well, basically since I first saw the Roadster in ~2008. The moment I saw a video of the Roadster, I said to a friend, “if these guys ever make an SUV, I'm in.” Fast-forward to February 8th 2012¹, when I watched the unveiling announcement of this fucking … beast … of a vehicle.
Meanwhile, I'd always known I wanted a pink car. I'm well-known amongst my friends, colleagues, and enemies as ‘the pink guy’ — there's always pink stuff on my person, scattered around my house, associated with my work — and it was inevitable that my dream car would end up being the most silly imaginable colour. Supercar or no, this girl was definitely gonna end up pink.
I've spent the better part of this year, on-and-off, researching: sourcing colour options, comparing the costs and benefits of various colourization methods. I considered a paint-job (but the part of me that was brought up fiscally conservative balked at that: what's the resale value of a pink car? Negative three hundred bucks, to get her towed to the junk-yard? /=), I researched wraps (but lord above, was I just gonna be That Guy²?) … and then I remembered the off-roading community's old obsession with Pasti-Dip³.
This was a rubberized, spray-on pseudo-paint that was originally popular to protect the tools people were using to work on their cars; it's probably no surprise somebody decided to spray it all over their truck. Most importantly, every person I'd known who dipped their car, would get bored with the colour in less than a year, and then do it all over again: this wasn't a paint, it was a recurrent hobby. Anyway, I guess some might have balked at choosing the same product that people put on '90s Wranglers for a Tesla supercar, but for me, this was freakin' perfect: I was dead-set on driving a pink car, but equally aware that it could turn out absolutely horribly. Here was my way to experiment with exotic finishes as much as I wanted!
So, fast-forward past more research and planning. (Which aftermarket wheels? Which interior finish? Was I going to get a chrome-delete? Where was I going to mount a mobile HAM kit, or my roadtrip iPad? I'm pretty sure most members of these forums know exactly what I'm talking about.
) I got in touch with Jameson and Matt at ChicagoDipped, out in the Chicagoland suburbs. They walked me through my options, and talked me through the various spray-on / peel-off products and finishes. (More on this in a later post.)Delivery day came around, despite a couple terrifying snafus with my bank, and I got to take Verity home. Almost immediately, I scheduled with them, and took her out to get her dipped; they worked around my schedule, addressed all my concerns with the ultrasonic and capaciative senors, spoilers, mirrors, and so on; and a few days later, I picked up this purdy girl!
tl;dr, Lookie, I have a beautiful pink car. Y'all should, too!
Postscript: Some of you have already seen her, as I'd wanted to do a more in-depth exploration of the process here on these forums, but had already posted some of these photos to Reddit or Facebook. (I see u dere, CuriousG.
)fn 1: I didn't actually reserve at the time, mind you. I've got too much experience with first-edition Apple products as a developer-and-perennial-early-adopter on Apple tech, to ever dump $100k on the engineering equivalent of a first-edition Apple Watch. >,>
fn 2: What is it with Lambo owners, bee-tea-dubstep? 'cuz, like … seriously. -_-
fn 3: Mind you, my inner Alaskan is laughing at this video being considered “off-roading.”
