An Interview With The Moscow Tesla Club
Igor Antarov is a business partner at the Moscow Tesla Club, an organization that promotes Tesla electric vehicles and sells and services them. It also sells and installs EV chargers, and supports the EV community, among other activities. In 2013, the club began delivering the Tesla Model S in Russia, and imported the first Model 3 in March of 2018.
Antarov recently took some time out of a very busy work schedule to provide some insights and details about Teslas in Russia for CleanTechnica.
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1. Your Tesla Model 3 video was fascinating in how it revealed the awareness level of strangers on the street. How surprised were you about the extent of their knowledge?
Thank you for the kind words!
We work on the issue of awareness since the foundation of our club four years ago. The level of awareness rises, but not as quick as we wish. I feel that there are still many myths and prejudices around electric cars since people keep asking the same questions.
We had the hypothesis on the present state of awareness that there are about 3 out of 10 people who are knowledgeable with EVs. Surprisingly, in this specific test, it was closer to 8/10, even though we’ve chosen the street crowded with tourists from other regions of Russia on purpose. Amazing!
This was a great surprise, but why we still feel low awareness in reality? Maybe we should conduct more tests.
2. Is that Model 3 your vehicle or does it belong to the club?
The car was registered as mine on paper, but it belonged to the Club. My business partner Alexey went to the USA to get it right on the first day when Tesla started deliveries to non-employees in December 2017. We brought the Model 3 to Russia as quickly as possible to showcase it to the Russian audience.
Such a presentation turned quite expensive for us, but we are glad we made it. We managed to show the car to many people, went on road trips, got featured in media and performed several tests and reviews.
3. How many miles are on the Model 3 in the video now, and what has your experience been so far with it?
The first thing we did after we got the Model 3 is traveled about 2,000 miles on the East Coast, USA in one week, right before the car was shipped to Russia. Actually, we invited journalists from the biggest Russian auto-magazine “Autoreview” to do some tests there ASAP.
We also used it for travels here in Russia as well. The Model 3 came to Moscow in winter which was quite unexpectedly harsh for the region, and the car did perfectly. It goes very nice on snow, ice, and a dirty slippy mess that covers our roads and is supposed to melt the ice.
In the Model 3 we made several trips in Russia, including the one from Moscow to Minsk, Belarus, and back. The total mileage in Russia resulted in about 6,000 miles.
You can see the video from the Belarus trip on our English Language channel, we compared the Model 3 against the Model S.
This photo was popular at the moment.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BgWGbyOn_L6/
4. How long have you been involved in the club and what are its goals?
We have a dream to replace all ICE cars with electric ones. I envision roads crowded by eco-friendly modern cars, that are quiet, safe to drive and cheap to maintain and I can’t stand waiting for this moment to come.
I personally started supporting Tesla since the beginning of the Model S. I see Tesla as one of the biggest agents of change in the world today. So, every forum thread, media source, and every acquaintance got some input about Tesla from me.
Meanwhile, my long-time friend Alexey watched the National Geographic ‘Megafactories – Tesla’ video and got very excited about the idea. It led him to establish the Club at the beginning of 2014. I helped him little bit remotely and joined as a business partner a year later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC3bUpt4m-A
In order to have at least some EVs on our roads, someone had to bring them to Russia. So Alexey made the move, he convinced the first owners and helped to import several vehicles for them. So that’s how we have a Club of Tesla owners and a company that helps to choose and import EVs. We also have a branch dealing with other electric cars — Electric Motors Club. But anyway, Tesla always has been a driver.
Now we have a team of 17 people working full-time on EV development. It takes a lot of effort pushing this market forward here, me and Alexey had a lot of 80-hour work weeks these years.
We promote EVs a lot, facilitate club and public events, work with the government to lobby EV-incentives, building public charging infrastructure, and bringing the real cars on the roads of course.
Recently we’ve signed a memo of cooperation with Russian Federal Road Agency — together we are going to expand the charging network on federal roads. It’s a huge success we have had, as federal support was only for gas refilling stations before that.
5. About how much does it cost to get a Tesla into Russia currently and will the costs ever decrease?
In Russia, we have to pay a 48% customs clearance for every imported car. On top of that, we’ve got to deal with a bunch of different fees, delivery cost, insurance, etc. So, as a result, it’s 55-60% more than a retail price in Europe.
We don’t see a way to establish a dealership for Tesla or other EV brands for now. Without that, we don’t see a way to make it cheaper for the end customer, we did everything we could in terms of logistics and costs.
We’re pushing hard to get customs clearance zeroed for EVs and to get other incentives from the government. Our work in expert committees has some progress on that. On the bright side, we’ve got free parking in Moscow for EVs, got tax exempts in some regions of Russia, and electricity in Russia is super cheap (0.02-0.07 USD per kWh).
6. How many members are in the club, and do you expect it to expand?
Today there are about 300 cars belonging to our club members. Just to add, they live not only in Moscow, but in many other regions. We also have a members only chat with 100+ active participants.
We work hard on the community developing, it’s the best way to spread the word. We run club events, even organized a trip to California in 2016 for club members, visiting Tesla factory and meeting with Tesla fans from other parts of Earth.
7. The other day I was walking in San Francisco on the waterfront and I saw your countryman’s super yacht, “Here Comes the Sun.” Are some wealthy businessmen importing Teslas, even if they are making a lot of money from oil and gas?
I can tell you a great example. In our club, there is a member working in an oil company. He can’t let himself drive his Tesla to work (his colleagues are unlikely to understand him), but he was extremely confident in purchasing the car to show his kids what is the real future.
Tesla owners are always interesting people, they are supporting innovation and technical progress. We have a lot of people from IT and other tech-related industries.
8. In your view, how much demand is there in Moscow and other Russian cities for Teslas?
The demand is certainly growing — we experienced the growth since the day we started importing those cars.
However, lack of financial incentives, weak government support, expensive custom clearance making Tesla not as popular as it might be in our country.
The Far East region of Russia is becoming filled with quite cheap Nissan Leafs imported from Japan. It makes a great opportunity for Tesla Model 3 — we see a very bright future for this car in the Russian market.
9. Are there Russians with Teslas who charge them from their home solar power systems with energy storage?
Solar panels are not so popular so far. But we have requests for Tesla Energy products, and we are ready to implement them if we could get a green light from Tesla Inc.
10. Is the government there friendly towards EVs, neutral, or not friendly?
The attitude differs, but there also is a lack of awareness. Mostly, government forces are neutral. Anyway, we have some support and activists there, working to raise the EV adoption and infrastructure issues. It’s always the real people who make the real change. We’re in contact with every supportive person in the government helping them to move a sluggish system.
11. Are there Russian companies that are making their own EVs?
There were several projects and prototypes. For instance, Lada El Lada. However, all of them are quite far from the production phase. Russian automotive industry is not very strong today, but this is the time to make new cars from scratch and maybe the changes are coming.
PS: Within Electric Motors Club we are working on projects that could be useful for global EV community and promote EVs all around the world. We recently launched https://evcompare.io/ a website aimed to grasp the outlook of the growing EV market. We want to help those people who are considering purchasing an electric car find the vehicle which suits them best. The website is in active development, so any feedback would be appreciated.
Image Credit: Igor Antarov
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