- Ferrari swapped Toyota's.
A Tesla swapped Honda.
(upbeat music)
How do I look?
- [Man] Sexy.
- Swapping an electric motor into an old gas guzzler
is a fun novelty.
Technology is getting better and cheaper
and electric cars are beating some of
the fastest gas super cars off the line.
But is really the future of tuning?
Let's find out.
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In this episode we'll find out, step by step,
what goes into swapping a gas engine out
for an electric one with the help of our friends
over at Electric GT.
You might know then as the guys who put an electric motor
in a Ferrari 308.
(tires screech)
But first, let's understand why people hate
on electric vehicles in the first place.
Reason number one.
They're slow.
While a lot of the more common econo EV's are kind f slow,
some other electric car models are faster
than any gas engine on the planet.
Take the rimac C2 for example.
It's got four individual electric motors
that produce 1888 horsepower.
That's insane.
Then there's the white zombie,
built on a 1972 Datsun 1200 platform,
this thing could hit zero to 60 in 1.8 seconds.
Not to keep talking about Tesla on a show
that all ready constantly talks about Tesla.
Tesla, Tesla, Tesla, Tesla, Tesla.
But their new coupe, the Roadster,
has a zero to 60 time,
a claim to zero to 60 time mind you,
of 1.9 seconds and a hypothetical top speed of 250.
Not sure I buy that part.
Yeah it's fast but it probably gets crappy range, right?
The Tesla Roadster has acclaimed 620 mile range per charge,
that's about the highest of any electric vehicle
on the market, but it's a good sign as to where
the industry is going.
With range and life of the battery
being expanded exponentially.
I'm lucky if I get 250 to the tank in my Mustang,
that's very true.
Which brings me to my next point.
Where am I gonna plug it in Nolan,
it's not like there's EV charging stations everywhere?
Uh, actually, there are, you're just not looking for them.
Plus, you can install them in your garage pretty easily.
So if I'm looking to save money
and do it all on my own, what exactly would it take
to convert my car to electric?
I'll admit, I stupidly thought
I would be able to just jump into the world
of electric swaps and be able to understand it easily,
but it turns out it's very, very complicated.
Way more than I thought.
So our friends over at Electric GT
offered to help me understand it a little better.
(energetic upbeat music)
- At Electric GT we design and engineer
electric power transfer classic vehicles.
- So what kind of chassis are preferred
for E swap candidates?
Do you guys play favorites?
What kind of characteristics are you guys looking for?
- I mean, typically rear wheel drive is the best way to go,
it just opens up your possibilities.
There's two different ways to go with that.
You can stick with your transmission,
do a motor to transmission.
That's a little more straight forward.
Or you can do a Tesla swap
which is you have to have independent suspension for
in the back.
- For a transmission swap, do you guys essentially
just bolt on a motor to the front
of the existing drive train,
or is there anything else you guys do?
- Essentially you're just taking a motor,
you're bolting it to a trans,
we do have to design some adapters
and make some special stuff.
Then under the hood we make it look good,
make it look fun, give it some style, right.
- So you guys have the body, besides that
are there any other components you guys use
from the existing car?
- So if we're doing transmission swap,
most of the things can stay.
Obviously we're getting rid of anything
internal combustion related, so no exhaust,
no gas, all that goes.
We keep the brakes, we add an electric brake booster,
all your suspension, like I said before,
is pretty much the same,
and then you've got the body which typically,
with these classics, need some work, need some help.
But a lot of it stays.
The 12 volt wiring we will typically just start from scratch
'cause we don't use 80% of it,
'cause 80% of it is related to the internal combustion.
(upbeat music)
So this is an electric motor.
It only has two moving parts.
There's a bearing on either end
and there's a rotor and it spins.
- And that's it? - That's it.
- What's going on inside of this to make it work.
- So inside of it there are several poles
and what happens is the controller here
excites those poles and it turns to each magnet pull
and it does that very, very quickly.
- What are these--
- So this is where your phase leads hook up.
So you have your phase leads here, so it's AC motor,
so there's three, and then these two terminals here
take in your DC, and this inverts it to AC.
- Wow.
- And it also does all kinds of software things
in the controller.
Sort of like in an ECU where you can control
how the engine does certain things,
you can control that inside of that controller.
- How much power is this motor here making?
- So this is about 120 horse
and it does about 173 foot pounds of torque.
So the horsepower number isn't overwhelming,
but the torque, it's 173 foot pounds
and that's form zero RPM.
You don't wait for torque in electric vehicles,
it's there now.
- And I heard there's a torque factor
that effects the horsepower number.
- So with an electric motor I said this was 120 horsepower,
but it's got that 173 foot pounds that available instantly.
So it feels more like 175 to 200 horsepower
rather than that 120.
There's sort of like a feels like conversion.
- The butt dyno.
- Yes, exactly, exactly.
- That's the truest dyno.
All that low end torque is awesome,
but what kind of effect does it have on
the old style transmissions
that you guy are mating them too?
- We'll definitely have them rebuild
and we'll run a stage two or stage three clutch
that can handle to torque.
You can pretty much drive all day in third
and then if you wanna have more spirited driving,
you wanna have some fun,
you can shovel through the gears like you always would.
(upbeat music)
- Do you wanna see it launch?
(laughs)
- So yeah, the motor isn't spinning,
there's no idling, so you don't clutch like you would,
you don't slip of the line like a stop light,
you just hit the accelerator and you accelerate,
and then use the clutch between gears.
- For the DIY guys out there,
are there any more affordable options
than this motor right here?
- So this motor starts at about four grand,
you can go up to crazy racing motors
from different companies, go to like 20 grand,
for a really budget conscious DIY guy,
you can get an old forklift motor
and hope it doesn't blow up.
- So something that I would be afraid of
is hurting the motor, how would you blow an electric motor?
- So you could ruin an electric motor by overheating it.
With a permanent magnet motor like this,
if it gets too warm then you demagnetize the magnets
and that's a bad thing.
But, what's great is it has a temperature sensor built in
and the software in the controller
will limit these things so that you can't damage it.
- What is the wiring situation like for an electric car?
- We typically get rid of about 80% of the harness
and it can be, it's somewhat complicated procedure
so you have to have some familiarity
with the circuit diagram,.
Like is said, you don't have an O2 sensor,
you don't have an Ox sensor,
you don't have all these sensors so that kind of nice,
the harness does shrink a little bit
but you do have to make your own custom harness.
(upbeat music)
- [Nolan] This does not look like any car battery
I've ever seen.
These cells in here, what are they from?
- So these modules here are out of a Tesla model S.
We have five of them.
In a model S there's 16 of them.
So in the Tesla it all lies in the floor
and they call it a skateboard chassis.
So what we do is we repackage the batteries.
This is a full built, aluminum enclosure,
spent a few hundred hours in cad
and you can do something like that too.
And then put the junction box that has
all the stuff that keeps the battery safe on this side.
The front is your high voltage connections
for the battery.
And then back here is the cooling.
- [Nolan] How does that effect range?
- We get about 80 miles out of this car.
So it's a great little round the town car.
- How is cooling on batteries different
from cooling an engine, is it different coolant?
- No, it's pretty much the same,
we're just pumping glycol through
and putting it through a radiator,
a heat exchanger, and cooling them.
- What's the weight balance of the car now?
- The weight balance for this car is 60 40,
60 in the rear, 40 in the front.
It was about reverse of that.
But having rear weight biased car
is actually a little more fun right.
- So yeah, that's kind of the cool thing
about these batteries,
is you don't have to just put them in one place right?
- So in the 2002 that we looked at before,
it gets one of these in the front
and one of these in the rear,
and you still have usable trunk,
usable front, back seat, everything.
(upbeat music)
- [Nolan] All right, so behind us we have Fiat 124.
- So we started with a bare bones chassis,
did a full resto, then we have the electric motor
under the hood with that speed controller on top of it,
we made it look fancy with some laser cut parts
and some 3D printed parts.
It's mates to the original transmission
via a little CNC adaptor there.
From there back to the wheels,
it's the same as it would be in an internal combustion car.
So here we are in the back of the car,
you still have usable trunk.
You could throw a few groceries in there
and that battery box we looked at on the table
is underneath the floor.
- Premium electrons only.
This is so cool dude.
I'm almost mad how good of a job you guys did
'cause all this just looks exactly,
it looks factory, this is--
- That's the idea.
- It's so freaking cool.
When do you think something like this
could be feasible for, let's say,
a very ambitious 16 year old.
- Kids these days are really good with computers
and we spend a lot of time on the computer doing this,
so I'd say in a few years.
- Okay.
It's an older car that was internal combustion,
can this be registered as an electric car?
- It can actually.
We took this car to DMV and you walk up to the counter,
you say you wanna make this electric,
they come out, they look at it,
they look in the engine bay, they say,
oh yeah, that'd be really hard
to put internal combustion back,
and then they mark it E
and you have an E title
and you never have to smog it again.
- Let's all just make electric cars,
we don't have to deal with that ever again,
we don't need to know a guy,
we just make it electric.
Do you think electric swaps are the future hot rod?
- Oh absolutely, there's no doubt in my mind,
it's a four gun conclusion, this is hot rodding,
it's not the future or hot rodding,
this is hot rodding.
- It's now, the future's now kids.
So it looks like for now,
us broke asses are gonna have to wait
for technology to catch up to our wallets,
or the other way around.
To get any significant power or range,
you still have to invest a decent chunk of cash,
but I think that electric swaps are the future.
And the way the car industry is trending proves that.
I almost got a vanity plate that said thick boy,
like I was just gonna have it at my desk,
but you actually have to put it on your car
and I dint wanna drive around LA with thick boy on my plate
so I ended up not picking it up.
Kind of wasted 50 bucks,
- [Man] You get two plates,
just don't rock the front one.
- God damn it.
No, but I didn't want it on my Mustang,
I didn't wanna.
Be nice, see you next time.