Electric Dreams
Polluting petrol engine out, super-clean electric motor in. Is that what we will have to do, one day, to continue driving our classics?
We bring together eight classic EV conversions for one enormous test.
Even if driving a car with an internal combustion engine won’t be illegal for many years yet, if ever, environmental awareness and the diminishing availability of hydrocarbon fuels will together push us all towards electricity. That’s the gloomy version. But there’s another view. Not only are electric cars clean (at the point of use, at least) and cheap to run, they can also be very entertaining. Some are almost ludicrously rapid and all that energy can be channelled into a converted classic as much as it can be into a brand-new electric car.
And one of the things we’ve learned from the
four companies who provided the cars here is vital to our world of practical classics. It’s something that we thought might never happen with electric cars, but there’s a culture of discovery, hands-on experimentation, knowledge about motors, inverters, shunts, controllers, relays, battery packs and a whole lot of new stuff for we car-nuts – electroheads, as we might very well become – to get our teeth into.
So, electric classics: sacrilege or sustainability? Let’s find out.
Electric Classic Cars:
Ferrari 308 GTS and VW Beetle
If genuine proof were needed that electric cars can be excitingly rapid cars, that any comparisons with milkfloats are missing the point entirely, it can definitely be found in these two impressive machines. And the reason for their extraordinary friskiness? They have Tesla powertrains.
In the case of the Beetle, it’s the 600bhp ‘performance’ one with 487 lb ft of torque, available from zero rpm in the usual way of electric motors. The motor is mounted in the tail, of course, with six LG lithium-ion battery packs under the bonnet and six more behind the rear seat. Each battery pack has an output of 60V, and is connected to its five neighbours in series to give a 360V output and a 30kwh capacity. The two six-packs are connected to each other in parallel to double the total capacity – giving a range of 100-140 miles – while maintaining that voltage. The result is a Beetle with, unlike the original, a near-equal weight distribution of 48 per cent front, 52 per cent rear. Battery packs are the main reason why electric cars tend to be heavy, of course, but the engineers at Electric Classic Cars have worked hard to eliminate weight elsewhere. So the wings, the bumpers and the seat shells are in carbonfibre, the windows are in Lexan plastic, and the whole car weighs around a ton.
All that torque calls for fat tyres, and they’re mounted on Porsche wheels. These cover Porsche 996 brakes at the front and VW Golf GTI items at the back. The 1303 suspension – struts at the front, semi-trailing arms at the rear, much like a pre-993 Porsche 911 – is heavily uprated, and the scene is set for a hot-rod Beetle of quite a different sort.
Apart from the lack of a gear lever and a clutch pedal, and those racy seats, there seems little out of the ordinary in this Beetle’s cabin. Until you look closely: then you’ll spot the touchscreen display that gives detail far deeper than you’d ever see in a mainstream modern electric car. You can actually analyse what each battery cell is doing: useful for the health-obsessed electrohead.
I switch on, there’s a slight hum and the Beetle is ready to go. A gentle push of the accelerator gives gentle acceleration, a firm push gives… well, you’ll back off pretty quickly the first time you try this. Stay with it, though, and the acceleration is both instant and savage. Electric Classic Cars engineer Richard Morgan, an experienced rally driver, then takes the wheel to demonstrate exactly what the Beetle can do. Two long black lines, a pall of rubber smoke and a queasy tummy later, I’ve witnessed acceleration of near-santa Pod ferocity, garnished with some very amusing power slides afterwards. Yes, electric cars can be very entertaining.
The owner of the Ferrari thinks so, too. He has driven up to our Peterborough Showground location from southern Bedfordshire, exploiting the extra range that comes from three battery six-packs rather than the Beetle’s two. The Ferrari’s nearsilent swish as it arrived was hard to square with the sleek redness materialising before us; of all the cars here today, this is the one that demands the deepest reprogramming of our remembered
relationship between sight and sound.
The Ferrari has ‘just’ 450bhp but, remarkably, it’s actually slightly lighter than it was when it had a V8. Like the Beetle, it has also gained a near-50:50 weight distribution rather than the 60 per cent it used to carry on its rear wheels. ‘It’s better in every way,’ says delighted owner Peter Brazier, ‘apart from the noise – and you soon get used to that. I do track days in it, and I had no idea what a difference the conversion would make. It feels so much better. It has even impressed proper petrolheads.’
Like the Beetle, the Ferrari has had its suspension recalibrated to suit its new weight distribution. Unlike the Beetle, its motor’s output has been dialled back a bit to make it manageable with two-wheel drive. It retains its gear lever, because it’s such an important part of a Ferrari cabin’s atmosphere, but now you just push it forward to go forward, pull it back to, well, you can guess.
The Ferrari is claimed to reach 60mph in 3.5 seconds. I didn’t attempt that, but it certainly feels very punchy, if not as deliberately bonkers as the Beetle. The whole conversion is beautifully executed, and this is one particular Ferrari that Peter (who has owned several) will be keeping well into the future.
London Electric Cars: Morris Minor, Land-rover Series IIA, Mini
The Minor is the gentlest of all the electric cars here and is also London Electric Cars’s first conversion. It uses the electric motor, battery pack and ancillaries from an electric Citroën C1, one of a batch of cars converted a decade ago by another company. They didn’t sell – too early for the market, too dull, too impractical – and, according to LEC’S Matthew Quitter, ‘the most underwhelming car imaginable. They just sat around in sheds.’
Here, he thought, was a cheap way to start experimenting with conversions for classics. It has 13kwh’s-worth of batteries, some under the boot floor, some up front, which give around 40 miles of range. The motor is a 50bhp, 70lb ft HPEVS AC30 from a company called High Performance Electric Vehicles, and it drives through a clutch and the standard Morris Minor gearbox.
So, do I drive it like a normal car? No, I don’t. The Minor is Matthew’s daily driver: ‘I use second gear in traffic, third on the open road. Or fourth.’ Clearly, electric motors aren’t fussy. I switch on, select second (no need for the clutch because the motor isn’t spinning yet), then press the accelerator.
We’re off, but with rather less ferocity than those Tesla-powered machines offered. The usual Minor gearbox whine is alive and well, and all feels oddly normal with a Minor-appropriate amount of urge.
Clutch down, into third, clutch up. Yes, that works, although it’s hardly necessary given the motor’s speed range and flat-lined torque output. This leads to the thought that the engine could be revved without being connected to the drivetrain, as an ICE engine can be, and therefore I could blip the ‘throttle’ during a downshift for maximum smoothness. Indeed, I can, but it’s very hard to estimate the motor’s speed. It doesn’t sound very happy as the revs drop, either, throbbing a little as it goes. Best to do as Matthew does – treat the gears as settings for speed ranges, then leave them alone.
These are whole new experiences, rather different from those you’d have in a brand-new electric car that is designed to make you not think about the mechanical activity. There’s even more of this in London Electric Cars’ Land-rover, powered by a punchier AC50 motor (80bhp, 120lb ft) and, again, keeping its original transmission. That means selectable four-wheel drive and the opportunity to engage low range.
As with the Morris, the power feels right for its surroundings and gear whines make for a suitable classic-sounding aural backdrop even if there’s no engine to drown out the rattles. The controllability of the electric motor from zero rpm would add to this Land-rover’s off-road abilities, and it all makes a surprising amount of sense. There are plenty of convenient places to house the batteries, too: under the seats where the fuel tank was, in the space at the back where the exhaust used to be, and even behind the front grille.
London Electric Cars’ latest conversion is to a Mini, and it’s a very different proposition.
‘Gear whines make for a suitable classic-sounding aural backdrop’
‘It’s a bit manic,’ says Matthew, or words to that effect. That’s because it uses the 109bhp, 207 lb ft powertrain from a Nissan Leaf, yet it’s a lot smaller and lighter than a Leaf. ‘The Leaf is the only Uk-made electric car,’ Matthew points out, enjoying the appropriateness for the entrails’ use in a Mini, ‘and it’s the one most found in scrapyards.’
At around £25,000 for the conversion, plus your donor Mini, this is a much cheaper way to an electric
Mini than some other firms are offering. Matthew reckons his way of doing it keeps more of the original car intact, too; it retains the original front subframe, for example. ‘Look, the Leaf motor is just made for it!’ he enthuses, and it does indeed fit very neatly under the Mini’s snub nose. LEC had to make custom driveshafts and turn the inverter round, but the original Mini radiator stays in order to cool the electrics.
This time there are neither gear lever nor clutch pedal, just a three-position toggle switch: forward, neutral, reverse. Flick the toggle switch, press the accelerator… and this Mini shoots away like no Mini I’ve ever driven before, delivering surprisingly little steering tug, but an impressive black line.
It has a usefully low centre of gravity, too, given that 20 of its batteries are under the front and rear seats, hidden by a fake floor. There are 20 more in the boot, giving a total of 20kwh for an 80-mile range, but a little luggage space remains. This electric
Mini, I have to say, is brilliant.