Classic car ownership is one of these things that is not just personal.
It is actually incredibly extroverted.
When you own a classic car, you can own it for your own
personal reasons and how you feel in that vehicle.
But countless times you're driving one of these cars, you pull up to a stop
sign, somebody shouts, "I had one of these back in 1973 and I loved it so much".
So there's this huge spike in the classic car market as a result of that,
a lot more people are turning their classic cars into electric vehicles.
These are fickle, finicky vehicles.
But when it's run by a massive battery and electric motor, it's
basically as reliable as a microwave oven.
To do it elegantly is really an art.
It's really about the love and the appreciation of this artform
and the ability to own it and drive it as trouble-free
and as seamlessly as possible. That's what we're about.
I'm Mark Davis.
I'm the founder of Moment Motor Company here in Austin, Texas.
And what we do is we transform vintage cars into electric vehicles.
I've been obsessed with cars since birth.
I love them in a way that seems unnatural.
You know, at this point, we've done over 20 different chassis,
and we've applied our technology to lots and lots of different types of vehicles.
Front wheel drive, rear wheel drive, all wheel drive, trucks,
sports cars, sedans, you name it.
Classic car ownership for as much enjoyment
as you get from driving the car, there is this constant dread
that you have, you know, under the surface,
thinking about what's likely to go wrong as you're driving that car.
You can smell things. You might hear something.
And it just is an endless kind of undercurrent of worry.
We have owners that come to us.
They want the seamlessness of just not worrying and just driving.
That's what the electrification does.
We have other clients who come to us
and they want the ability to appreciate that art form,
but they want to do it
with a sense that they're doing something with less impact to our planet.
So the first step, when a client comes to us with a particular car,
really what we're trying to do is assure that this is going to be feasible.
I don't want to be responsible for tearing down a client car
and finding out that we really just don't have a good solution.
We really like to go and look at every aspect of that vehicle.
Really, what we can do is start looking at the components that we know work,
blocking out a solution in our minds that we think will be
a reasonable approach to electrifying.
"So here's what we got back here, huh?" Once
we've got a plan, we start tearing it apart.
Really, all we are doing is we're pulling out the combustion
drive train: engine, transmission, fuel system, things like that.
We're doing that as carefully and meticulously as possible.
Our goal is to not hack this up.
Our motto is "First, do no harm.", right?
And you really don't want to dive into one of these beautiful classics
with a grinder and a cut off wheel and slice it all up and do
horrible things to it.
The next step... that starts with a 3D scan.
The first step in that is to put down locating dots all over,
so the scanner can know exactly where it is in 3D space.
The next step is to get the engine bay, the trunk, the underbody scanned
so that we can bring it into our CAD application and start designing the parts
that we need to install the drive train.
Once we have the car scanned, we're able to take these battery boxes,
motors, and our motor mounting systems and drop them into the car virtually.
Then, we go through the painstaking task of custom designing and engineering
he brackets, the platform,
the mounts that will put these components into that specific chassis.
These are not modern electric vehicles with a skateboard
of batteries underneath them.
And so we don't have the luxury
of tearing the floor out and replacing it with a big battery pack.
We have to put them in the places in the car that that are now empty,
which are typically the engine bay and the trunk.
We send those designs out to the laser cutters,
the water jetters, the machine shops, who will then
send us the results and we'll be able to
bring them back into the shop and test fit them on the car.
Very quickly we arrive at a final design and a final set of components that we can
weld, finish, send off for powder coat and paint,
and then it will come back to us for installation.
So in 2021 in the US, at auction - that's online
and in person auctions, 36,000 classic cars were bought in the U.S.
and that's a huge increase even over, you know, pretty high pre-pandemic levels.
So it's about 56% increase over 2019 and that represents
2.2 billion in transactions and that's an even larger increase.
So these cars are going for even more money
That's just auctions.
The peer to peer market, which people selling their cars
to each other on Craigslist, Facebook, any number of platforms like that is about
ten times bigger.
So it's, it's really a vital and liquid market and it's booming at the moment.
Electrifying classic cars... it is a controversial thing.
I mean, the people that do this are told all the time that they are
"taking the soul out of a car", and that the sound and the smell
is a huge part of the experience.
And there may be some truth to that for some people.
But if they're not getting out to drive the car
because they're not sure it'll start,
that's valid on the other side of the argument, too.
It's an act of preservation.
It started
about a decade ago just with people who decided to electrify
their cherished classic, and some of those hobby projects turned into businesses.
It's a really interesting skunkworks required
to kind of make one of these shops work,
and that's one of the reasons why there's not a ton of them.
I like to describe myself as a wayward engineer.
I went to engineering school and went to work in the software industry
and spent a long time in the technology industry.
The whole way, though, I did what we were told to do, which is do the thing
that you're good at to make the money so that you can do the thing that you love
on the weekends and on the side.
And I did that and I followed the money,
and I finally just couldn't take it anymore.
I was sick of hot rodding my cars in my garage
in a couple of hours in the evening after my kids went to bed.
I really wanted to do something that I loved, something I
could be passionate about.
I think the opportunity of electrifying
classic cars kind of presented itself as a unique combination
of the things that I was good at and the things that I loved.
I could apply technology to something that was not just a piece of software
for a customer.
So that opportunity was something that I took.
I made the leap and I started the company and here we are.
Once we've designed and test fit all of these brackets and components,
then the process
is really taking these finished parts and installing everything in the car.
If you look at an electric motor, it's typically a fraction of the size
of the combustion engine.
And so oftentimes we can fit the motor and a single speed reduction gearbox
in the same space where the original transmission was,
and the entire engine bay becomes available
for us to put batteries and other components in it.
We're also looking to make sure that we're not putting
stresses on the chassis in areas that it wasn't designed to take.
If you just put the electric motor
in the engine bay and you put batteries in the trunk, you're
going to end up an incredibly unbalanced and possibly dangerous car.
So we try to distribute the weight of the batteries throughout the chassis.
Our goal is to retain the performance and the feel of this car.
These cars were designed 50 years ago very precisely by hundreds,
if not thousands of engineers who were trying to create a certain drive.
We want to respect that as much as possible.
Then, we are wiring everything together.
Wiring up a car... it's kind of in two phases.
There is the high voltage wiring that powers the motor
and connects the battery pack to the system.
And that is relatively simple and straightforward.
But there's another
set of wiring that happens in these cars that we call vehicle control wiring.
We want this car to be driven and enjoyed the same way that it's always been
with the beautiful gauges that were designed in the sixties with the
analog sweeping needles and things like that.
Nobody's buying this wanting a Tesla, right?
They don't want to get into a classic car and have a giant
iPad on their dashboard.
There's so many components
that we install, so many different things that have to come together,
and it's kind of like we've put an orchestra together for the first time
and those first drives, when you get in the car,
tap your little conductor's wand on the thing and say, Okay, let's do this.
Let's try this piece from the start.
You go out on the drive and you know what
the drummer is, you know, pushing, pushing a little too hard and
you know, the trumpets are just, just not quite hitting that high note.
You hear all of those things, you take it all in and you think, Okay,
there's something here.
We're going to be able to get there, but we got to work on these things.
We are out there putting hundreds, if not thousands of miles on the car,
making sure that it responds
the way that it should, intuitively drives the way you would expect it to.
We're able to manipulate torque curves and all sorts of inputs and controls.
We can change the way that the motor reacts to the throttle position,
if you will.
We take this time to tune each section of this orchestra
and bring it all together so that when you get in and you drive it,
it is a flawless performance, one that makes people smile and cry
and engages them in a way that they have never driven before.
And that's the goal.
We often get the question, Well, how much does this cost?
And the reality is
it depends a lot on the car that we're that we're starting with:
the size of the car, the condition of the car
and the performance and range requirements of the owner.
So it is a pretty large range, but it can be anywhere from $50,000
to $150,000.
In terms of moving the needle on climate change,
transportation is critical and arguably the lowest hanging fruit.
This is a huge swath of greenhouse gas emissions and electrifying
these vehicles is kind of one of the easiest and fastest ways
The new E.V.
market last year in the world was about 7 million vehicles.
That's about 10% of the global sales.
Both globally and in the U.S.
the E.V. market more than doubled last year.
The adoption curve is steepening quite a bit faster
than most people even expected.
By most people, I would include auto executives in that.
Ford Motor, for example, is rushing to make electric vehicles
as fast as they can. "Mr. President...." "...This sucker's quick."
There will always be
people driving their gasoline cars, even 50 years from now.
Maybe more at that point. And it'll be such a novelty.
But I think the shift is going to happen quickly.
The adoption is going to be fast.
And faster than we realized.
The implications of maintenance on a classic car with a 60 year
old drive train are significant, right?
It's a diminishing population of people who are able to do that,
and the parts are hard to get and the knowledge is hard to come by.
And there's something that feels a little bit like that's coming to an end.
And I think
that for people to put in place a, you know, modern electric drive
train gives them a confidence in the future,
gives them the, you know, the feeling that they can no longer,
you know, worry about that.
When you go and you look at the beauty and the simplicity
involved in an electric motor, I mean, there's only two parts where
the moving parts touch one another - on the bearings, right?
And that's it.
And everything just spins with electromagnetism.
There's no real comparison
between that technology and what we used to use to propel cars.
So, I don't know, I think that that is the future.