- This classic car is powered by the sun.
And this is the guy who made it possible.
An engineer turned mechanic, he's using off the shelf
parts to transform gas-guzzlers
into powerful electric vehicles.
Giving them a second chance to rule the road.
Meet Micheal Bream
He owns EV West near San Diego, California.
It's an auto mechanic shop like you've never seen before.
- Yo, I think my favorite thing about
electric cars is that we're learning something every day.
It's not often you get to go to work and show up
excited, and just really eager to learn something new.
Every single car that we have converted here
we have made more powerful.
We're here to improve things.
And if it's not a notable improvement,
then we're not doing our job.
- In this shop, you won't find your
typical grease monkeys.
- We have uh typical electric tape monkeys
not grease monkeys, but uh we really got into this
through racing, and we just set out to do something
that was a little more challenging,
a little bit more cerebral, and that's when
we kinda had the idea.
Let's build and electric car and race the second
oldest race in America,
the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb.
It took us about a year to build the car.
We had it ready in 2012, and then raced later that year.
The car put down almost 1000 horse power.
It was just an absolute dream to drive.
It took us to the top of the mountain and set a record
in the street legal electric car class.
And we beat you know entire classes of gas cars.
The power and the ability that the electrification
affords us made us a small little group of dudes
super comptetive against multi-national corporations
with teams of engineers.
That's not an every day thing.
It was just so clear that this was our future now.
And it just had to continue, we just had to continue.
We'll get customers that maybe have a car
that's been sitting at home and it's not quite
drivable anymore.
We just encourage them to bring it in the way that it is.
You don't need to make it fancy, you just need to make
the car driveable to really enjoy it.
- Manufacturers made electric cars
but we didn't like em, you know so you know kinda
didn't want to drive em in the beginning, right?
We wanted to drive something very specific.
- So the guys at EV West have taken
matters into their own hands and created a way
to make your favorite classic cars zero emissions.
Something that the big car companies haven't been
able to do since the early days of electric cars
back in the late 1800's.
- We remove the gas engine and we install the
motor flywall and clutch assembly.
We put a light weight lithium battery pack in it
and a charger, some instrumentation and you're
pretty much good to go.
- But it's more than just building
electric vehicles.
It's creating a truly renewable, sustainable source
of energy to power these cars.
- This is the EV West power wall.
Basically we have on the rough 18, 260 watt panels
that's direct current coming off the roof
so it comes right into our DC chargers an MPPT charger.
So a maximum power point tractor.
And what this does it it puts the maximum load
on the solar panels so they're at peak efficiency all day.
After that, this charger comes over and it actually
charges our battery packs that are still DC.
This is 33 kilowatt hours of Tesla 18650 batteries
there's really no Tesla made parts other than the
batteries that we repurpose out of the cars.
That's the EV West power wall in a nut shell.
So just that one power wall unit provides
enough fuel for all of these cars to drive for free
No emissions, nothing taken out of the grid.
Just uh taking care of ourselves.
- Lunch time
- My insurance company called me up
and wanted to cancel my policy because I have 22 cars.
I can't stop, it's too much fun.
It is literally too much fun.
I think the spirit of DIY just kinda means
do it with maybe not the full knowledge set.
People will ask us well, how is this going to work out?
And our answer is we will tell you when we're done.
Cause we haven't done it before, and that's exciting.
Ask any car guy, wanna do something you've done before?
No. You wanna do something you haven't done before?
Yeah.
There's an excitement around electric cars that is
just growing so much faster than we anticipated.
To the point where our shop is booked up for 3 and a half
years out, you know?
We're just a small family run business and we're
literally just trying to do our part as best as we can.
You know here's this form of transportation that we have now
it's completely sustainable that you can drive for
the rest of your life on that energy and that's
pretty amazing thing that we're experiencing now.
The performance is just exponential.
It's just like nothing you'll ever experience in your life.
Yeah. And this is just the beginning.