This year, The Tesla Owners Global Leadership Summit was in Los Angeles and I had the chance to meet Tesla Club leaders from all over the world. It’s also where I had the honour of meeting Leilani Münter for the first time. Leilani is a former race car driver, an environmental activist and she’s a Tesla Model S and 3 owner who charges her cars with the solar panels on her home. She’s been named the #1 eco-athlete in the world by Discovery’s Planet Green, one of the top ten female race car drivers in the world by Sports Illustrated and was given the Genius Award by ELLE Magazine. She’s an advocate for renewable energy, electric cars, veganism and animal rights.

Leilani is on the board of the Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS) which is a non-profit organization that creates inspirational media to save the oceans. In 2015, following the success of The Cove, Leilani worked with OPS on a documentary called Racing Extinction where she drives a very special Tesla Model S. The film is very powerful and brings to light animal extinction in a way that’s relatable to all of us. There have been five mass extinctions in the history of our planet and we may be in the midst of a sixth.

At the Summit, Leilani was part of a Tesla Community panel alongside Bonnie Norman and Ryan McCaffrey. She was also the keynote speaker on the last day and spoke to the clubs about wildlife preservation, and what our responsibilities are going forward. #StartWith1Thing

She was also kind enough to make time during the event to sit down with me and answer a few questions about her Tesla and her work as an activist. I’ve been following Leilani for some time and idolize her in many ways. Spending time with her in LA was a personal highlight.

When did Tesla become an object of desire for you?

As soon as the Roadster came out, Tesla somehow landed on my radar. I don’t remember exactly what brought it to my attention, but I know it was right around the time of the Roadster. Being a race car driver and an environmentalist, Tesla was my two worlds crashing together.

I was finally seeing a car that would satisfy my race car driver side but was also electric. It was so unusual at the time, because it wasn’t a Nissan Leaf or a Prius, it was a bad-ass beautiful car. I knew I was going to own one eventually. When the Model S came out, to me that’s the most beautiful car. The design is just gorgeous and at every angle she’s so beautiful.

It’s funny because the first time I spoke at a Tesla event it was in 2013. That’s when I met Bonnie Norman and I announced in my speech that I had ordered my car that morning. It’s been such an amazing journey. I love the car so much and I believe in the company so much.

I’m super happy to see all these other electric cars that are now coming out, but my loyalty lies with Tesla and that is because they risked everything to make this car, and truly disrupted the auto industry and forced the hand of all the others. None of the other electric cars would even exist was it not for Tesla. To me there is only one electric car company. All the others are going to come out with one now, but I’ll be a Tesla owner for life.

Leilani and her Tesla Model S - Image from Leilani.green

What’s your cars’ name?

My Model S is Phoenix and that was decided over many months. It was a very big deal in my household (as we both laugh out loud). We decided on Phoenix because 1. she was rising from the ashes of the other electric cars that had failed before, (so Phoenix rising) 2. because she flies and 3. because she’s hot like Phoenix Arizona. When we got the Model 3 last year, they became sisters and we wanted her to also be a bird, so we settled on naming her Ladyhawke (Old movie with Matthew Broderick and Michelle Pfeiffer). We’re child free by choice so the cars and our rescue kitties are our children. So of course, when we named our cars it’s fairly a big deal … at least to me, not sure if it’s as big a deal to my husband (laughs out loud).

A: I hear you – I don’t have kids and my Model 3 is my baby. I haven’t named her yet because it’s a lot of pressure and I can’t decide on one.

L: It will come to you. I’m curious to know, so you’ll have to let me know when you decide.

Other than then the fact that the car is electric, what is one of your favourite features on the car?

I can’t say just one thing. I would say, the speed, the low centre of gravity so it handles so well, especially with the plus suspension (Tesla Model S P85+ only made for a short period of time) which is brilliant. I also really love the handles coming out. I always love that when I walk up to the car, she feels me coming near her and lifts her handles out, it’s so cool – so cool! I have the air suspension so I can drop her really low. In every angle, to me, the Model S is just a work of art. Mine is a 2013 and there are no parking sensors so I love that she’s very clean. She still looks like a sculpture. When I started to see the cameras and parking sensors on other models, I thought it was like putting a sticker on the Mona Lisa. That should not be allowed even though I know that it has to be there for autopilot. Now that we have the Model 3, I see all the benefits of the car having these extra eyes. But my Model S is pure, she doesn’t have any of that. She’s classic and those are all the reasons why I love her.

Have you done any modifications on her?

No. The only thing I’ve done to her is that she just got the arachnid wheels, two weeks ago. That was one of the rewards if you had a certain number of referrals in the past and I just put those on. They’re black and she’s silver. I always liked the dark grey turbines. I wasn’t sure if I was going to like the arachnids but they’re mean looking and they’re black.

The other thing I did to protect her was a clear wrap. It’s a self-healing wrap so if a little nick or a rock hits the car and there’s a little scratch, over time as the wrap sits in the sun, it will disappear. I’ve had that wrap on since 2013 so it’s six years old and it’s starting to get dinged up, so I’m going to pull it off.

Will you apply another one?

I don’t know. I was looking at the cars here today (at the summit) and some of the wraps are just so beautiful. One had a brushed metal look to it. I think if I was to do another wrap, instead of wrapping it clear, I would do something like that. But I also like the silver and the dark wheels, so I’ll probably just leave it. Maybe I’ll save the wrap money and put it towards my future roadster.

Although you’ve been involved in environmental activism for many years, the spotlight wasn’t on the subject as much as it is now. Do you feel like things are slowly changing and your efforts are starting to pay off?

Yes, it feels like the things that I’ve been fighting for a long time are finally starting to happen. For example, one of the things that I did with the Vegan Car, was that I gave away Impossible Burgers at my races at the NASCAR tracks. At the time when I announced that car, people thought that I was just crazy. They thought, ‘Oh my gosh NASCAR fans don’t want to have vegan food.’ People thought it was the craziest idea ever and yet we gave away 30,000 vegan cheeseburgers at five race weekends. We could not make the burgers fast enough. People were standing in line and waiting for us to come out with the trays and it would all be gone. The demand was off the charts. Then I started getting feedback on social media, people saying things like, ‘Hey I just wanted you to know that I came through your tent at Talladega and I’ve been a vegan since.’ Or race fans would send me pictures of their grocery carts full of vegan products like Gardein, vegan mac and cheese, vegan ice cream and say, ‘Hey I’ve truly changed since I went through your tent and I can’t believe how good all this food is.’ and ‘I’ve lost weight and my cholesterol is down and I’m off my diabetes medication.’ So many great stories like that and those kinds of interactions are what keep me going.

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I feel like we’ve hit a tipping point. Even though I’ve been talking about electric cars for a long time, and being vegan for so long, it felt like a struggle to get people to listen or acknowledge and then be willing to change. Now it’s exciting to see that we can go to Burger King and get an Impossible Whopper and Hardee’s is adding Beyond Meat to their menu and Carl’s Jr. already has the Beyond Burger and McDonalds is working on their own vegan burger. I’ve been wanting to see this for years and now it’s everywhere and it makes me so happy. It makes me happy to see veganism blown up like it’s normal and we’re not weirdos anymore. It feels like electric cars are getting there too and it makes me happy to see other EVs on the road. I’ve been fighting to get those things to that 10% tipping point, and now I’m seeing it real time. The explosion of that wildfire idea (that the article refers to) and how it can be such a struggle at first and feel like there’s no progress at times, but then as soon as it hits that 10%, BOOM! That’s how I feel about Veganism. I’m seeing ads now and it’s crazy to me to see things after so many years of wishing that it would happen. It’s very rewarding and I feel like we weren’t fighting for nothing.

Look at Greta Thunberg. It’s magical. It shows you that even though you may feel like you’re shouting into the void, you’re not! Someone is listening. You may not know how many people are listening and most of the time, those people probably won’t give you feedback. While I had a lot of people saying, ‘I went vegan since going through your tent,’ a lot of them probably did and never told me. They never took the time, they’re not on Twitter or they didn’t take the time to find me. I try to keep that in mind and save the ones that mean a lot to me because it gives me hope to keep going when I feel depressed.

I wake up and I say to myself, ‘Ok I’m going to fight for the world!’ I’m motivated but throughout the day seeing all the shitty news, I’m thinking, Shit, we’re doomed, it’s fucking over!

A: To hear you have this conversation with yourself is comforting to me. I can feel hopeless at times and I know others feel like that too and to hear you say this, makes me believe that the perseverance is also part of the fight. I sometimes get in my head and question myself on some of the things that I do. Hearing you right now say this, makes me feel like it’s ok and it’s normal.

L: It’s totally normal. All activist feel like this.

There was a guy today who said that he wasn’t fully vegan but that he was getting there, and he said it’s because of me. Those things I tend to hold on to, just because there is so much hatred and so many trolls. It can get you down and I’m human like everyone else and hearing people say things like, I should commit suicide, after a while I do ask myself ‘what am I doing?’ Why do I put myself out there to be attacked and have so much negative energy thrown at me. Even though I can turn it off and I don’t have to look at everything, I’m still connected cause that’s how we communicate to the world now. So, I really hold on to the nice stories and I’ve heard so many nice stories today amongst this friendly audience.

Was it ever an issue with your friends and family when they didn’t agree with what you were saying and doing? Perhaps they even thought you were changing and questioned you.

Yes, for sure. There were people around me that didn’t want to change their lifestyle. When you change yours, you’re saying that I’m doing this because it’s wrong how animals are treated and I’m not going to be a part of that or it’s horrible how we’re burning down the rainforest so that we can have more pasture land to grow more grain for cattle grazing. All these things are essentially the result of our choices, and unless we start changing our choices, we’re not going to change those things.

When somebody isn’t ready to make those changes, and you have made them, they will get defensive. They will feel that by you making that change, you’re saying that they’re doing something bad. That’s their own guilt because they know in their heart that you’re doing the right thing and you’re pointing them out. It’s a reflection and you’re pointing to them and saying that they’re still making the bad choice. I try to remember that I wasn’t always vegan. I wasn’t always vegetarian. It was a process for me. It was a journey. And as your eyes open, you start to open up more and more and then it starts to affect everything that you do. I’m not perfect. I try to do as much as I can, but there was a point when I didn’t have my eyes open. You have to try to be as patient as you possibly can and try to encourage people to do what they can even if it’s something small like meatless Mondays. You have to let people go through their process and everybody’s is different. You’ll win a lot more people over if you’re kind about their place in the journey rather than being judgmental or mean. It would be dishonest to say that we’re not judging a little. Everybody is. We’re all having our internal conversations when we see the guy with the big truck or eating the big steak and you’re thinking, Wow is that really necessary?

Try to be as forgiving as possible and try to realize that everyone is in a different stage of their eyes opening up. I do feel that when your eyes open to these things, part of that is that it becomes your responsibility to try and help open up the eyes of others around you. It may be a bit of a burden because you find yourself having to talk to people who have the plastic bags or eating that steak. You may want to influence them in a positive way and in some ways maybe it would be easier if I didn’t care, but I do care and I can’t help it.

When did this change happen for you? What was the trigger that made you decide that you wanted to fight for the environment and the animals?

I was always an environmentalist. I remember I was in grade school and this little boy in the playground was smashing an ant hill and I was furious. I was yelling, ‘That’s their home, do you know how long it took them to build that and you’re smashing it because you’re bored!!!!’

I got into a huge fight with this boy because I was so mad that he was disrespecting the ants. That part of me has always there from a young age. I’ve always felt very angry when people are mean to animals. It’s their world too and we’re just sharing it with them. We’re not superior to animals. We’re sharing this earth with them. The point in time that I went from talking to friends and family and to being an activist and screaming as loud as I possibly could from the roof top was when I saw an Inconvenient Truth. That was in 2006 and I went to the theatre with my boyfriend at the time who’s now my husband. We walked out of the theater and I remember us having a conversation and saying that we’re not doing enough and that our efforts were not enough and that I need to do something bigger. That’s when I realised that I should be talking to the race fans about this. I put up a section on my racing website in 2006 that was all environmental. Anything that was related to alternative fuel, or green buildings or plant-based diets, I would post it. I remember getting a lot of blow back. People in racing, especially in marketing, were not happy. They would tell me to take that stuff off my site because it would ruin my racing career and that no one would sponsor my car.

I didn’t care. If they’re not going to sponsor my car because I’m doing good things for our planet, then I’ll quit. I won’t race, but I’m not going to pretend that this isn’t going on.

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Somewhere on my site, I answered a comment and suggested the Inconvenient Truth as a movie that everyone should see. I noticed all this traffic coming into my site from a NASCAR forum and I thought that was kind of odd. I checked the forum and it was a post linking to my site saying; This idiot driver is brain washed by Al Gore, she’s promoting this horrible lying documentary, making up this fake thing and really just throwing me under the bus and calling me all kinds of names. By the time I saw it, it was several pages long on the forum. It started out trashing me and other race fans chiming in but then somebody at the bottom said, ‘Hey has anyone actually seen the film? Cause it’s a little weird if you’re hating on this race car driver for talking about a film that you haven’t even seen yet’. So, then the conversation shifted from attacking me to, ‘What about the film?’. Then it evolved further from there and the conversation became about global warming and climate change and by the end of the thread there were people posting graphs of the parts per carbon dioxide in our atmosphere ON A NASCAR FORUM, when normally they only talk about racing. That was the moment when the hair stood up on the back of my neck and I thought, ‘Oh my God! I’ve got them posting about carbon dioxide on a NASCAR forum. That’s amazing’. When everybody thought that I was crazy to leave California after getting my biology degree to go race cars, ‘Oh I’ve got a degree in biology specializing in ecology behavior and evolution but I’m moving to North Carolina to be a race car driver.’ All my friends where asking me ‘are you ok?’ They all thought that I had lost my mind. But then it all made sense - I can be a bridge between the science and the environmentalism and climate change and I can infiltrate this other demographic of people who are watching car races and because I’m a driver they will listen to me. That was a light bulb moment when it made sense why my journey was so weird. I was supposed to bring those two places together. That became my whole goal. How do I get this on the car? How do I get this documentary on the car and how do I give away this DVD? We started crowd funding to run the Cove car. Then people who also felt the same way as I did about the environment and climate change and animal rights, they found me, and we started to work together. It all turned out great, even though at the beginning people thought I was nuts.

A: This was your calling.

L: Yes, but at the time I didn’t know that. It took 18 years for it to make sense and where I can now look back and say that I understand why it all happened. I don’t know if the universe is steering me or if I’m steering it. But I find that often times when you look back the journey does makes sense, even though while it’s happening it can be very confusing.

What’s next? What are you working on? What are you putting your energy in to for the next 5 years?

Leilani Münter and Director Louie Psihoyos. Image for ejinsight.com

Extinction took five years to make so realistically that’s what I expect I’ll be working on for the next five years. Also to just be learning from Louie Psihoyos who’s our executive director and founder of Oceanic Preservation Society. He was a still photographer and a National Geographic’s photographer. His first film was The Cove, which won an Academy Award in 2010, still to this day the most award-winning documentary of all time. It was the first documentary in history to sweep all the film Guild Awards. It won every film festival it entered. It’s an amazing film. Activism took over my life after I watched The Cove. I have a chance to really learn from Louie and be mentored by him and learn the whole process of film making. He’s just one of the best in the world and I want to take advantage of this opportunity to make a film with him. I had the opportunity to keep racing, but I knew that this window of opportunity of film making could close and this means more to me. The activism means more to me than racing.

So hopefully in five years when I see you, I’ll be playing my new documentary. I’m 45 years old and I’m starting a whole new career and I’m really excited.

And I'm excited for you!!!

Tesla Model S in Racing Extinction. Image from imbd.com

Racing Extinction blew me away, and I highly recommend that everyone watch it. The main thing I took from the film is that we can all do something - Just Start With One Thing!

Being more conscious of what we're buying is huge. We can make a difference by how we decide to spend our money.

One of my favorite quotes from the movie is by Jane Goodall;

Huge Thank you to Leilani for allowing me to interview her. Thank you for setting an example and inspiring me so much. I can’t wait to see the new doc.

Leilani’s website is full of great pictures, videos and links to other interviews and articles. Follow along Leilani’s journey on Twitter, Instagram and on Facebook.

What is your favourite environmental documentary and how did it change you?

When you watch Racing Extinction, drop me a line here and let me know what you think.