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.
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.
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?
