SIMON GOLDS WORTHY
I have been looking at a couple of potential candidates for future project cars, both of them true design classics that can trace their origins back some 75 years or more. (There are no prizes for guessing what they are, but feel free to have a go anyway and send in your suggestions.) One of them was being sold without an engine , and that got me idly thinking about the possibilities of also carrying out a conversion to electric power.
Now before you throw down the magazine in disgust, I should say that I have serious doubts about the global green credentials of electric cars, and I am also not totally convinced either way whether converting classics is a good idea that will allow us to continue driving them unhindered by legislation or an act of vandalism. So don’t start worrying that the direction of Classics Monthly is about to change dramatically, or that we have all decided to hop on the latest bandwagon to roll by. However, the classic car scene is a broad church and we cater to many different tastes here at CM. So while we tend to prefer original to extensively modified cars for our features, I have no doubt that such a project would interest plenty of readers, even if others were vehemently opposed to the idea.
As it happens though, we are not going to start a civil war in this way for that most prosaic of reasons – money, or rather a lack of it! In my ignorance I had thought that it might be possible to carry out such a conversion for something like £10,000. Then I started digging around and found that £30,000 was a more realistic starting point. That’s certainly what Kinghorn Electric Vehicles, the company who converted the Nissan Bluebird pictured at the top of this page (and featured in the News on p8), estimate as the going rate using secondhand Nissan Leaf running gear. Presumably using new equipment would cost even more. And don’t forget that to this not inconsiderable sum you have to add the cost of buying a car in the first place and restoring it generally. So all of a sudden you are looking at £40,000 or more to move the emissions from a tail pipe in the UK to the factories that build electric motors, batteries, wind turbines, solar panels and so on before shipping them around the world. To be perfectly honest, I suspect that would be less green in the long run than continuing to drive a regular classic for limited miles that has spread its environmental build cost over many decades already.
Clearly I am not the first person to raise any of these points, and I do realise there are arguments for and against each and every plan of action. I certainly don’t have the answers, any more than I have £40K to sink into a restoration.