tesla redefined. since 2013.
unplugged performance
Before there was Unplugged Performance, there was a kid hunting for used VHS tapes of Japanese time attack races and dog-eared copies of Option Magazine.
Ben Schaffer didn’t just fall in love with cars. He fell in love with the philosophy behind them. The Japanese concept of otaku: relentless, obsessive mastery of a single pursuit.
Ben Schaffer grew up like a lot of car kids. Saving up, wrenching on weekends, watching races he couldn’t afford to attend. What made him different was what he did with it. He got on a plane to Japan. He spent years there learning from the kind of builders most people only read about. Small shops. Quiet guys who worked slowly and got things right. He was not a celebrity over there. He was just someone who showed up, kept his mouth shut, and paid attention.
He brought that back home and built Bulletproof Automotive from the ground up. No investors. No shortcuts. Just a shop in California where he and a small crew did the kind of work that didn’t need explaining when you saw it.
Along the way, his cars ended up in places he never planned for. His Honda S2000 made it into The Fast and the Furious and later Fast and Furious 4.
Ben drove a Model S for the first time in 2013 and something clicked. Not because it was the fastest thing he had ever been in, but because he could feel what it wasn’t yet. The handling had room. The aero had room. The whole car had room. Everywhere he looked he saw something a good builder could make better.
Most people in the automotive world looked at a Tesla and saw a computer with wheels. Ben looked at it and saw a platform nobody had touched yet.
He opened Unplugged Performance that same year in Hawthorne, California, a few blocks from SpaceX and right next door to the Tesla Design Center. He took delivery of a Model S P85 as the shop’s first development car and got to work. No fanfare. No announcement. Just a guy who had spent a career learning how to make cars better, and a car that needed exactly that. The way he put it was simple. You have to deeply understand the DNA of the product before you can improve it. That is what he set out to do with every Tesla model from day one.
Nobody in the aftermarket believed it would work. That part did not bother him much.
The industry called it a gamble. When Unplugged Performance debuted its first modified Tesla at the 2014 SEMA Show, it was met with skepticism. Nobody believed a performance aftermarket existed for electric vehicles.
UP showed up anyway. The car was a Model S P85 with a full carbon fiber body kit, a reworked interior, and a set of BBS wheels. People stopped. They had questions. That was enough.
Over the next few years the work started speaking on its own. Randy Pobst drove an Unplugged Performance Tesla Model S Plaid up Pikes Peak and set records that nobody thought an electric car could run. Shaquille O’Neal also came to Hawthorne to have his Tesla Model S done and Joe Rogan’s Model S Plaid S-APEX left the shop.
UP also founded TESLACORSA, a racing series built around Tesla owners who wanted to actually use their Teslas on track.
By the time most people figured out the Tesla aftermarket was a legitimate space, Unplugged Performance had already been building it for years.
Today Unplugged Performance still operates out of Hawthorne, California. The product line spans every Tesla in production, Model S, 3, X, Y, Cybertruck. Through UP.FIT, the company’s fleet and professional vehicle division, Unplugged Performance has become the go-to partner for law enforcement agencies across the country. South Pasadena launched the world’s first all-Tesla, all-EV police fleet using UP.FIT vehicles. Anaheim PD and Irvine PD followed. The world’s first Tesla Cybertruck police vehicle came out of the UP.FIT program.
On track, the Dark Helmet Model S Plaid set the record for the fastest modified EV at Pikes Peak in 2023 and took the Gridlife Pacific Championship Unlimited Class title in 2024. The same year, their Model 3 Performance set a new AWD class record at Gridlife.
The parts keep getting better too. A wheel designed with a hypercar designer. A carbon fiber kit for the 2024+ Model 3 Performance. The UP-RW Road Warrior, the world’s first indestructible wheel for Tesla. A collaboration with Von Holzhausen on bespoke leather interiors. Builds for Joe Rogan, Shaquille O’Neal, Jon Jones, Full Mag, and many more that ended up in front of millions of people.
EXCELLENCE
OBSESSION
DNA
Unplugged Performance engineers the evolution of speed. Where electric innovation meets uncompromising performance.
