AUSTIN POWERS!
1934 classic all charged up for 2021
IT’S a classic from a bygone era of motoring.
But while David Wallis’s 1934 Austin Seven might look its age from the outside, under the hood it’s a thoroughly modern electric car that meets the most stringent emissions rules.
The 84-year-old retired lecturer has spent the past six months in his home workshop converting the vintage opentop tourer to run on electricity.
He bought an immaculate example of auto designer Herbert Austin’s ‘affordable car’ – originally built to put motoring within the reach of ordinary people between the wars – for £12,000 last year.
‘I was driving around like Toad of Toad Hall,’ said Mr Wallis, from Cheadle Hulme, near Manchester. ‘But it didn’t excite me.’
So the great-grandfather, whose background is in electrical engineering, decided to turn it into a conversion project.
He found a suitable 10KW electrical motor for £1,600 in China and substituted it for the original 747cc petrol engine.
The hardest part of the project was designing and building the components needed to send the electrical power to the drivetrain turning the wheels.
It was made more challenging by the fact that Mr Wallis did the conversion without harming the original bodywork – so even drilling new holes was ruled out. The car now runs on 28 rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, as used in the Mitsubishi Outlander plug-in hybrid electric vehicle.
The electrified Seven has a top speed of 40mph and a full charge gives it around two hours of driving time.
Unfortunately the car sounds ‘like a sewing machine’, said Mr Wallis, who took on the project as a much-needed diversion from the strains of caring for his wife Maureen, 82, who has late-stage dementia.
So he uses a speaker linked to his mobile that lets him to make the Seven sound like a full-throated Ferrari or a Bugatti.