This is a 1976 BMW 2002.
Really fun to drive car but underpowered.
This particular customer decided that he wanted to
go what we call the whole hog, and he's doing
the 550 horsepower Tesla drive unit in this.
This is a typical car that we like to do.
We're a speed shop. We love high horsepower.
We love to make a car like this that's already
fun to drive super fun to drive.
In San Diego, California this shop specializes in
custom electric cars.
EV West is part of a growing trend of
converting gas vehicles to EVs and it's not
alone. All over the world, enthusiasts are
trading in their internal combustion
engines for the power and efficiency of
electric.
This started out as a 1977 Porsche 911.
He's melded both Tesla and then other
aftermarket components and able to build into a
conversion.
Interest in electric vehicles is at an all
time high, with sales of new EVs up 55% in 2022
compared to the year prior.
We will probably hit about 1 in 10 cars sold
in the U.S. Having a plug. For a new
powertrain in 10, 12 years, that's pretty
substantial. Hybrids did not get to that number.
And regulatory mandates are only hoping to
accelerate adoption.
Places like California and many European
countries are saying no more gasoline light-duty
sales of new vehicles shall be sold by such and
such a date, 2035, some are later, a few are
earlier.
But there are a lot of gas cars still on the
road today and there will be for a long time.
There are about 1.2 billion vehicles on the
planet now. And for the U.S., the average vehicle
on U.S. Roads is now 12 years old.
EV conversions could be a solution to get more
internal combustion engine, or ICE, cars off
the roads. Both the shops and aftermarket
community are growing substantially to meet the
new demand.
All these component suppliers are going to
come out and have these kits so that you can
convert virtually any vehicle that's on the
road to EV.
Being involved in electric cars right now
is like being involved in computers in the 90s.
We want this transition to sustainable fuels to
be fun and exciting for people that are a part of
car culture and automotive enthusiasts.
The history of modifying and hot rodding cars goes
way back to the 1940s.
This industry really started in the 40s after
World War II, where a lot of our army soldiers
came back but had had training in aerospace and
those sorts of things. They started to make hot
rod parts to make cars go faster.
Today we've got a younger generation that's
hot rodding EVs.
Much of that community is about performance first
and foremost. That's why some of the very first EV
conversions were done.
One of the earliest EV conversions was an
electric drag racer.
White Zombie. It was a Datsun 1200 from about
1971, tiny little thing.
And he put enough batteries in it with high
power delivery that he just trounced everybody
at drag strips. No one believed it.
In the early days, purpose built electric
vehicle components didn't exist.
Once Tesla came onto the scene, conversions were
mostly being done with salvaged batteries and
motors from its cars.
When the EV conversion market started, it was
really taking a wrecked Tesla and taking all the
components out of it and putting it into your '69
Camaro or your Porsche that's behind me or any
of those sorts of vehicles and hot rodding
it with EV products.
Today, the conversion industry is exploding
with everything from DIY enthusiasts to custom
shops.
It's much easier nowadays to build an electric car
than it was just ten years ago.
I'm the son of a hot rodder who grew up in
Hollywood and have just always been fascinated by
cars. EV West was the formation of having that
love for car culture and crossing it with a
freshly minted computer engineer who was looking
to do some more exciting things with automotive.
Michael Bream founded EV West in 2009 as an
experimental shop to explore the performance
capabilities of electric vehicles.
All great companies have great founding stories
and ours was basically let's just build a race
car. We rented the space here and started working
on our first electric car project, which was a
shop owned project.
We had a little bit more focus on the hobbyist
market, but very quickly it was apparent this was
much bigger than our initial plans.
Today, Bream and his team are converting classic
and specialty cars to electric, one of the many
shops that have popped up to meet the growing
demand. His has gotten to be so popular it has a
4 to 5 year wait to get in the door.
We're in a real heavy growth pattern, double
digit percentage growth every single year, year
over year. Now we're working with shops that
we've helped bring into the business as
authorized installation centers.
The shop handles every step of the conversion,
generally using components salvaged from
crashed EVs.
These motors here have just been pulled out of
cars. From here they're going to go next door,
we're going to run them on our test stand and
qualify them to be resold to a customer.
Here you can see several raw of the large battery
packs coming out of cars. And then we'll
process those batteries and actually open them up
and remove the internals and then test the
individual battery modules. Typically,
because of the size of an electric car battery,
we're not going to put that whole battery in
your classic car. We're going to put a fraction
of it, maybe half or one third of it.
So it does require us to open up the enclosure,
rearrange the battery pack appropriately to the
right voltage, and then offer that as a system
component.
EV West is now supporting the aftermarket DIY
community as well, developing and selling
its own components.
We always like to add functionality to a
product. So in the early Tesla cars, they failed
to put fuzes on their battery monitoring
systems. So this aftermarket PC card that
we built adds the fuzed protection to it on our
aftermarket BMS. So it's actually a little bit
safer to operate than the factory Tesla BMS.
A quickly growing segment is DIYers who are taking
these projects on themselves. The
complexity of electric vehicles can be
intimidating, but that hasn't stopped 14 year
old Frances Farnham, who is working on converting
a 1976 Porsche 914.
Okay. Welcome to the Tinkergineering 914
studio. This is where I've been working on my
car these past couple of years.
Everything is out of the car except for the
steering wheel and we took out the transaxle in
the engine bay. We redid that.
And what I've been doing currently is I've been
trying to get this nut off in order to be able
to take off this suspension and restore
it.
Frances got the car three years ago and has been
documenting the process on her YouTube channel,
Tinkergineering.
I've always wanted an electric car and my mom
has a BMW i3 and I always thought that was
so cool. I had originally had the
YouTube channel and then when we thought of the
idea, Oh my gosh, we should do a car on this.
We should make it electric on this channel.
Because the name is Tinker Engineering put
together. And so we're like, Oh my gosh, that
fits so well. And it fit into our mission
statement to inspire other kids.
And so my dad was like, Yeah, let's, let's do it.
She just finished priming the car for paint and is
getting ready to rebuild it.
A 914 internet community has been instrumental in
helping her and her father through the whole
process.
As we were taking it apart, I found this blog
on the internet and it was this guy who had
converted a yellow 914 to electric.
That's how I met my first and like probably
one of my number one mentors, Mark Brems.
Without him, I wouldn't have been able to do any
of this at all.
To learn how to work with electric systems, she
took a course with Legacy EV that taught her
the ins and outs of doing a conversion.
I just went during my spring break and it was
honestly really, really cool.
And they have all the parts there and that
taught me how to attach all the components
together and make sure that everything worked
properly. I got to learn how to program stuff.
I had previously not known anything and my
plan was like, Oh, I'm just going to wing it.
It can't be that hard. I'm so glad I took that
class because I would have electrocuted myself
within 15 seconds.
Leveraging her YouTube channel, Frances has been
able to use sponsorships to help her cover most of
the costs for the repair. She's hoping to
have the car ready by the time she is eligible
for her learner's permit.
Hopefully before my school lets out, I'll be
able to have this painted. Then I'm just
going to put everything back in, make sure
everything works. And keep up with my
partnership with 914 Rubber.
So I'll make videos of their parts and then
they'll send me the parts. And so I'll be
able to put those parts into my car.
Then it's just the electric components,
which shouldn't take too long. And then I have a
fully running car.
The aftermarket ecosystem is blowing up with EV
focused components to support people like
Frances who want to build their own electric
car.
Now what's happening is there's a lot of
manufacturers showing up with electric motors,
with battery packs, with components, with
harnesses to convert a older ICE engine, or an
internal combustion engine, into the EV
market.
Both Ford and GM offer aftermarket components
for EV conversions, and there are several other
companies entering the space as well.
Both Ford and General Motors have what we call
crate motors being developed, but there's
all these other aftermarket manufacturers
that are doing those sorts of conversion kits,
and we're really fostering that.
SEMA, the Specialty Equipment Market
Association, is a trade organization that
represents automotive manufacturers and
resellers.
We help manufacturers develop products, take
them to market. SEMA represents 7,000 or so
companies, but the automotive aftermarket is
about a $51 billion a year industry.
It holds an annual business trade show in
Las Vegas that attracts 160,000 people in the
aftermarket community. In recent years, it has
seen the number of EV focused products grow
exponentially.
We started two years ago at SEMA with having an EV
section at the show. It was 2,000 square feet.
This last year it was 22,000 square feet.
I'm sure in the next five years it'll be
100,000 square feet.
To support the aftermarket community,
SEMA introduced a bill called SB 301 before the
state of California to try and provide
incentives for people converting gas vehicles.
If you buy a brand new EV vehicle, there's a rebate
available. But currently there is no such thing
for somebody that wants to convert their vehicle.
So SEMA is sponsoring that bill to get
conversions a rebate of $2,000, and we think
that's just a start.
I have heard a number of people say, okay, the
used car market, two and a half times as large in
the U.S. As the new car market every year.
Why can't we convert those to electric?
And the answer is you just don't get very good
electric cars.
Due to the size and weight of modern battery
packs. A car originally designed for a gas engine
will never be as good as one designed from the
ground up to be electric.
You have to break the battery into multiple
pieces of a few hundred pounds apiece.
One in the trunk, maybe one where the gas tank
went, maybe one under the rear seat, one in the
engine compartment.
And because of the custom engineering needed for
each build, it is likely to be too cost
prohibitive to go mainstream.
The engineering is sufficiently different
that I just don't ever see it happening at scale
affordably.
A typical conversion for an electric classic car
would be about 20 to $30,000 for the parts and
components. And then if you're going to have a
shot professionally install that you're
looking at about another $20,000 to $30,000.
So on average, about $40,000 to $60,000 plus
your classic car is about the going rate for
a conversion.
But for certain specialty vehicles such as street
sweepers, bucket trucks, garbage trucks and
others, conversions could make sense on a
larger scale.
Some of those vehicles have really long
lifespans. We're talking 20, 25 years and they go
through 2 or 3 diesel engines in that period.
Is there a possibility of saying, especially if
they're incentivized, is there a model to convert
them somewhere in the middle of their lifecycle
to electric as well?
And some companies are starting to talk about
the fact that it actually wins them
consumer and public acceptance points too.
And it could actually end up being cheaper for
fleets to operate, especially with the
complexity surrounding diesel vehicle
regulations.
Fleet buyers pencil it all out.
They build a spreadsheet. They're
saying, What does it cost to buy?
How much is the fuel?
Electricity always wins there.
And what's the annual maintenance?
And so if you have a cheaper fuel or energy
source and you only need 20% of the maintenance on
the vehicle, you can justify over its lifespan
a higher annual cost.
But the biggest business opportunity that bridges
the conversion space and the EV market is
knowledge on how to work on them.
The vocational side of this is incredibly
important. They're really struggling to
attract younger people into vehicle mechanics as
a career.
SEMA spends a lot of time doing education work and
has recently begun offering courses teaching
electric vehicles.
We have an education team here that talks about a
lot of subjects. The next piece of that for us
is going to be definitely education on
EV.
As an early pioneer in the space, EV West has
had people visit from all over the world to
observe and learn from them.
Poland, Japan, Chile, Colombia, Mexico.
I mean, I could go on and on.
We've literally had people come here from all
over and have gone back to their countries and
started, based on our business model, their own
EV conversion shops.
It has reached so much interest over the years
that it partnered with a local nonprofit, the EV
Learning Center, to create curriculum to
train people.
The Electric Vehicle Learning Center is a STEM
school that covers all aspects of electric
vehicles. We have courses for children, we
have courses for adults, and we do programs where
we reach out to schools in the community as well.
We've so far have sold out of every class that
we've put on there. We literally can't keep up
with the demand.
And other similar institutions are popping
up elsewhere.
I also just heard about an enterprise here in New
York that combines the build it yourself, sort
of DIY EV, with training younger people to be EV
mechanics. And all of those people will have
jobs because the adoption curve for EVs is
going to be really steep and there will be
mechanics needed.
I never thought people would be so enthusiastic
about just a girl converting a car.
Seeing all these like, you know, even the kids
faces light up and then people are like, woah, I
want to keep helping you because I really love
what you did here, here, here. And so I'm like,
whoa. It's just it's shocking.
I hope what I'm doing with this is I'm proving
that it's not too challenging and that you
can't do this because you need to be this old.
You need to have this much money.
I'm just doing this in my backyard with my dad.
When you're involved in electric cars, you know
that the success is guaranteed.
How long the transition is going to take is
really the only thing we're talking about now.
And are we going to make the transition to
sustainable fuels fun and exciting for people
along the way, or is it going to feel more like a
chore? Well, we want it to feel more like a fun
hobby.