Five,
four,
three,
two,
one. (car engine roaring)
(upbeat music)
This is a 1968 Porsche 912
powered by a Tesla drivetrain.
It's not just fast;
it's the culmination of a years-long boom
in taking vintage cars and retrofitting them
with EV technology.
It's the brainchild of two guys:
David Bernardo, the founder of Zelectric Motors,
a shop that restores old cars with a modern twist,
and Michael Bream, the founder of EV West,
which specializes in high-performance modifications.
(Michael Bream laughing)
(lighthearted music)
Zelectric started out as a personal project.
I wanted to take a Volkswagen and make it electric.
I would've liked to have done a bus,
started with that, but they're crazy pricey.
Back when we started, you can get a nice car for
$7,000, $8,000, $9,000.
So we got a nice ragtop and were determined
to make that electric.
We started in 2010, and there were probably
three or four years that the phone just didn't ring.
The email inbox was mostly empty.
But it wasn't really until this last three years or so
that the public's really turned onto this.
During that time,
Tesla went from a kooky startup
on the fringes of Silicon Valley
to the most serious player in electric cars.
As soon as Tesla came out, my interest grew
in taking a classic car and make it electric
because their first electric car didn't look like
an appliance.
Michael and David have been working
together for almost a decade now
and have a growing list of happy customers
and eager buyers, and that's let them take
on more complicated and expensive builds
like the Volkswagen Microbus.
I mean, we get emails every single day
from people all over the planet,
and it's their favorite vehicle.
They want that to be electric.
And I disappoint a lot of people
because our focus is just Volkswagens and Porsches
from the '50s and '60s,
and that's keeping us super busy.
It's keeping us all very, very busy right now.
Our waitlist to get in the shop
now extends three to four years out,
so we're booking appointments for 2023.
Despite that increasing workload,
Michael and David were eager to take
on a bigger challenge.
That's where the Tesla-powered Porsche 912 comes in.
This customer brought it in,
thought it was a fantastic project.
A little bit of a challenge, engineering-wise,
because the car is much smaller
than the cars that we're pulling the components out of.
A Tesla drive unit comes out of a
5,500-pound car, and we're trying to shoehorn it
into about a 2,300-pound car.
The result of that engineering
is 550 horsepower and 4,500 pound-feet of torque.
The donor car was a Tesla P85
from which they pulled out the motor,
inverter, the rear differential,
and even the throttle pedal.
Zelectric doesn't use the Tesla battery
because it weighs too much.
Instead, they use a 32kWh LG Chem battery pack,
split into two 16kWh portions
to balance out the car.
This 912 will also lay the groundwork for future builds.
EV West plans to sell a 912 conversion kit
for roughly $50,000.
There's a surprisingly long history
of people tinkering with electric cars.
But lately, the cost of the technology
that powers them has gone way down
while the availability of the parts
and the knowledge of how to put them together
has gone way up.
This has resulted in a boom of weird, cool,
and increasingly fast custom EVs.
I had very low expectations
because the electrified VWs I'd seen online
were just Frankenstein's monsters.
They're filled with golf cart batteries
in the back seat and strange motors.
They really were bad.
So I assumed it was going to be like that
and that I'll do the test drive,
it'd be interesting.
But I wasn't going to buy one,
and I was blown away.
That's Paul Stone
and his 1966 electric Beetle.
He's one of Zelectric's first customers.
The first time I drove it
and got out onto the street
and really stepped on the accelerator,
it blew me away.
In first gear, it'll throw you into the back seat.
This isn't Paul's first time
buying into electric drivetrains.
He says he was one of the first
Prius owners in California,
and so the work that EV West
and Zelectric are doing makes sense for him.
But the idea of messing around with vintage cars,
especially retrofitting them with EV tech,
isn't for everyone.
You get two reactions:
either people think it is the greatest thing
and great for repurposing an older vehicle
or it is sacrilege, blasphemy.
I think part of the experience
of having a classic car is to have
the driving experience of a classic car,
and it depends on what your needs
and your wants and your desires are.
In some ways, retrofitting an electric motor
to a car that didn't have one originally,
it defeats the purpose a little bit
of having a classic car or having a vintage car
because most people who have those kinds
of vehicles want the authentic motoring experience.
And you can't get that with an electric motor
in your Volkswagen Bug or your Porsche
or any other car that you want to retrofit.
If you've got a rare car,
a really rare car like a Porsche 901,
one of the pre-911 Porsches,
and you want to convert it to an electric car,
it's yours, you certainly can do that,
but you're diminishing the hobby
by taking something very rare,
something very important and modifying it,
likely to the state that
it will be very difficult to return it
to its original configuration.
Michael and David say they try
to construct their cars so they could be converted back,
though they don't really expect that to happen.
But Leslie Kendall's comments illustrate a larger point:
of course some of the people who have spent decades,
maybe even most of their lives,
finding, restoring, collecting, tuning,
and showing off vintage cars aren't going
to like what shops like Zelectric
and EV West are doing.
It goes past vintage cars, too.
Electric racing series like Formula E
have needed to work extra hard to prove themselves
alongside traditional racing series.
And while EV sales are slowly ticking up around the world,
consumers in the US are actually buying
more gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks in the near-term.
I think a lot of people think we take
perfectly good running cars and convert them.
And what we actually do is more along the lines
of what happened with the 912,
where you have a car, kind of incomplete,
kind of rusty, and it's right on the edge
of maybe just going to the junkyard
and being done.
And these cars are great
because they typically don't have
the engines in them. You can get a good deal,
and that's what we have here with this.
The public, in general, is not going to jump through hoops
to move a new technology forward.
But if you make it a little bit easy,
if you make it convenient, then
that's actually a very good reason for the public
to participate in moving forward that technology.
The electric car revolution is not a shift
that will happen overnight,
but shops like EV West and Zelectric
and projects like the Tesla-powered Porsche
are signs that car culture is starting to adapt
to this new reality — and they have the order books
to prove it.
Hey, everybody. Thanks for watching.
Make sure to like and subscribe if you like this video.
And now I'm going to leave you
with a bunch of Tesla-powered Porsche burnouts.