It is bright pink, it sounds like a V8, and when you “rev” it, its heart-shaped exhaust tips blow bubbles. The Unicorn is a 2024 Tesla Model Y Long Range owned by Jo, who has built it with her husband Matt in the UK. For the past few months they have taken it to roughly two car shows a week, mostly traditional modified-car events where it is often the only electric car. Tesla Mag asked them how it came about.
From a BMW i3 to “The Unicorn”
It started for a practical reason. Jo was commuting from Colchester into London “and spending a fortune doing it”, so the couple tried an electric car, a BMW i3S. “It was a brilliant, nippy little car, but we quickly realised it simply wasn’t big enough for us,” she says. Next came a Tesla Model S 85D with free Supercharging for life, then a Model S P100D, which they restored, wrapped in Avery Dennison Prismatic Grey and fitted with an active sound system.
Between the performance and the colour-changing wrap, they kept joking that they had found their “unicorn”. Then, by chance, they spotted the registration UN14 CRN for sale. “At that point we thought, ‘Well, we have to buy that!’ And that’s really where The Unicorn was born,” Jo says.
The P100D went to someone who fell in love with it at a Supercharger, and a Model X P100D followed. But the aftermarket scene for the Model S and Model X was too thin: “Almost everything we wanted was available for the Model 3 and Model Y.” The Model Y won, quick and practical, good for long trips and for carrying show equipment, with “a huge range of aftermarket parts”. They bought it in black, “because we already knew it wasn’t going to stay black.”
Momentum Pink and a yoke
The wrap is KPMF Momentum Pink, applied by FUZE Visual in Colchester. “People regularly ask whether it’s actually paint,” Jo says. It is her favourite part of the build: “I wanted to walk across a car park and immediately know which car was mine.”
The pink is what made it my Unicorn.
Jo, The Unicorn Tesla
The list of modifications keeps growing. According to the couple’s own spec sheet, it includes an acceleration boost adding 100 bhp, a Plaid-style yoke steering wheel, which Jo loves and Matt finds hard to drive with, roof rails, flower-petal wheel covers and road-legal “bubble” number plates. Outside, a front splitter, side window louvres and stylised mirror caps. Inside, a graffiti-style wrap, a rear fridge, 3D-printed accents, illuminated door sills and a full set of 3W Auto-Life mats, sponsored by the brand. Even the valve caps are unicorns.
A V8 soundtrack from Germany
For driving, the modification that matters most is the Maxhaust active sound system, from a company based in Mainhausen, Germany, where the couple travelled to have it installed. “One of the things we both missed when we moved to EVs was engine noise,” Jo says. The system responds to the accelerator and plays anything from V8-style sounds to pops, bangs and simulated gear changes.
It’s artificial and we’re not pretending otherwise — that’s part of the fun. But for us, it puts some of the theatre back into driving an EV.
Jo, The Unicorn Tesla
How do you make a Tesla blow bubbles?
The exhausts began as a joke. “I was lying there one night, as usual thinking about the car and obsessing over what we could possibly do to it next, when I suddenly thought: ‘What if we put exhausts on it?’” Matt recalls. “Obviously, putting exhausts on a Tesla is completely pointless — which was precisely why we loved the idea.” He found heart-shaped exhaust tips on AliExpress. Jo’s verdict: “Oh my word, I love them!”
To fit exhausts to a car that has no exhaust system, they built a show set-up on the removable towbar cover, with help from their friend Tim, who “has an engineer’s brain and owns a building company”. Then came the next joke: what if something actually came out of them? “Smoke was discussed. Then bubbles came up. And bubbles were just so much more Unicorn,” Matt says.
The finished show system integrates the bubbles into the heart-shaped exhausts and can make them respond to the car’s acceleration input. How exactly remains their secret: “It took far too many hours of experimenting and dismantling things to give all our secrets away!” They are careful not to claim the idea itself, since another Tesla owner in America had already experimented with bubbles from the towbar-cover area. “What we did do was develop our own version of the system.”
“The ultimate Marmite car”
The couple deliberately take The Unicorn to traditional modified-car shows rather than EV events. “The Unicorn is probably the ultimate Marmite car. People seem to either absolutely love it or absolutely hate it — but almost nobody ignores it,” Jo says. Visitors spot the pink Tesla, hear a V8, notice the hearts, “and then we turn on the bubbles.”
Matt describes a turnaround that happens “surprisingly often”. People arrive saying they don’t like Teslas, ask about one modification, then another, and the conversation turns to their own car. “And quite often the conversation finishes with: ‘I still don’t like Teslas… but I actually like this one.’”
Recently, The Unicorn was the only EV among more than 100 modified cars at The Ultimate Show in Liverpool. “What mattered was that somebody had looked at this bright pink electric car we’d spent so much time creating and said: ‘Yes. That belongs here too,’” Matt says. At Castle Combe, it was selected for the Top 50 and paraded around the circuit with the bubbles on, and on 26 September it was displayed on the Samco Sport sponsor stand at the Castle Combe Performance Action Day.
Car culture, not an EV bubble
That is the point of the whole project. “We don’t want The Unicorn to exist in a separate little EV bubble. We go to traditional modified-car shows because we are car people,” Jo says. Matt goes further: “We don’t see EVs as the end of traditional car culture. We see them becoming another part of it.” He hopes that one day nobody will care what powers a modified car: “They’ll be arguing about wheels, suspension and body kits instead!”
For Jo, there is another side to it. “The traditional modified-car scene can feel very male-dominated,” she says, and turning up as a woman in a bright pink Tesla “isn’t exactly the easiest way to blend into the background! But that’s actually become quite empowering.” Women regularly stop her, at shows or in a supermarket car park, to say they love the car. “That means a lot to me.”
Five figures, and not even halfway
The build has taken about a year so far and is “comfortably well into five figures”, Jo says, “and the scary thing is we’re not even halfway finished.” The biggest investment is time: hardly an evening goes by without research, parts hunting or work on the car. “Some people spend their evenings watching box sets. We spend ours modifying Teslas!”
The Unicorn is not the only project in the household. Matt has his own cat-themed Tesla Model 3, covered with around 7,000 individually applied stickers, with a pair of comically oversized Duracell batteries in the frunk.
There have been setbacks too. Earlier this year, the couple took The Unicorn across Europe to Tesla Takeover in Austria. On the way home, another driver ran into the back of them in stop-start traffic. The repair cost around £15,000 and took about six weeks. “It was never going to end the project,” Jo says.
What’s next for The Unicorn
- Air suspension: “We’re going to bag it,” Matt says.
- Heart-shaped Heritage wheels, because “if you’ve already got heart-shaped exhausts, heart-shaped wheels make perfect sense!”
- A full body kit, possibly widebody.
- Underglow.
- Bespoke 3D-printed parts, and a project with a company in Germany that the couple are keeping secret until they can show it.
“We keep joking that we’ll carry on modifying The Unicorn until there’s nothing left to modify,” Matt says. In the end, the car is about the two of them. “It’s our hobby, our creative outlet, our adventures and this slightly crazy little chapter of our marriage all rolled into one bright pink Tesla,” Jo says. One day, looking at a photo of it, they hope to be able to say: “Yeah. We did that.”
Follow The Unicorn on Instagram at @TheUnicornTesla, and Jo’s EV channel, She Drives Electric, on YouTube.
The Unicorn Tesla: your questions
What car is The Unicorn Tesla?
A 2024 Tesla Model Y Long Range AWD wrapped in KPMF Momentum Pink, owned by Jo and built with her husband Matt in the UK. Its registration is UN14 CRN.
Does The Unicorn really have exhausts?
Not working ones. The heart-shaped exhaust tips are a show set-up mounted on the removable towbar cover. The engine-like sound comes from a Maxhaust active sound system.
How do the bubbles work?
A bubble system is built into the heart-shaped exhausts and can respond to the car’s acceleration input. The couple keep the exact mechanism to themselves.
Where can you see The Unicorn?
At UK modified-car shows, where the couple have been taking it roughly twice a week in recent months, and on Instagram at @TheUnicornTesla.
Quotes and photos: Jo and Matthew, The Unicorn Tesla, in emails to Tesla Mag on 26 and 28 September 2026.
