*EPIC* 600hp 1000kg Tesla powered Beetle ! [In-Depth Review and Drive]

hey guys and welcome to petroped and welcome to newtown mid wales yes i am actually at electric classic cars where we filmed vintage voltage because all throughout filming there was a car that was often in the workshop in various states of um build and it's behind me that may well look like a normal vw beetle but it's not oh no it's had a little bit of electric classic cars and moggy madness sprinkled onto it [Music] now it sure is good to be back here at electric classic cars and i cannot tell you how excited i am to finally get this car on the channel and to share it with you because it really is very very special now normally in my videos i'm the one doing the talking and the explaining and and kind of telling you all about the car but i'm not the expert on this car but moggy is so i'm going to go inside find moggy drag him off of whatever job he's doing in the workshop and get him to walk us around this car because when we did his crew cab um and that was back in the last year early part of this year um there were quite a few comments about we want to know more about the details more about the actual work so we're going to go overboard on this one i'm going to tell you everything there is to know about this car um in terms of how it was done the power the challenges everything and then with a bit of luck we might take it up the road for for a spin because utter it's madness you'll recognize this chap moggy good to have you back on the channel my friend good to see you right so i'm finally back here in wales to get my hands on a car i've wanted to drive for a while oh you're gonna drive it well i'm gonna experience it i don't know whether i'm brave enough to drive it to be honest so you may or may not know but we've known each other for a long time longer than i tend to actually longer than i can remember now i can remember yeah so we were at university together uh in like 1990 to 93 19. it was all still in black and white yeah pretty much and at that time this chap had a beetle now the beetle we're going to look at today isn't the same beetle but you still have that beetle i do indeed but an absolute beetle nut air cooled nut was and at some point in the past you decided to go electric and put a 600 horsepower tesla drivetrain in a beetle correct yeah and i thought you guys would like to see the car but the best person to talk around the car and to explain everything is you know it's you mate so moggy's going to show us around the car so uh let's take a look because it's it's quite special and he's quite special right then the beast so first thing i had to sort out before i even thought about putting 600 horsepower into this thing was how is it going to be able to cope with 600 horsepower and the speed that comes with it so the first thing i did get you know coming from my sort of like rallying background and things like that is lighten the car up because whenever you drop weight off a car that's free power so the first thing i started looking at is things like you know weight savings so we put carbon fiber bumpers on the front uh fiberglass wings on the front and you know around the car in different places we we just lightened it up the car ended up being about a thousand kilos with everything on it so it's a 600 horsepower per ton vehicle this is so we're talking about hyper car territory wow so there's a lot of lightning that's got into this car and i'll touch on those but the other thing that's worth mentioning now i'm at the front as well apart from the led headlights which obviously you know really uh improve the lighting uh compared to the old candles the old car because this is a daily driver this is not like you know something that's you know covered in a cloth for you know all of its life and two days in the summer it comes out this i drive this back and forth to work um so the other thing is aerodynamics um a beetle has never been known to be an aerodynamic um wizard so we had to do some aerodynamic changes to keep the car planted at higher speeds yeah so for instance we've got an air dam at the front and at the back there's a spoiler and that really helps to keep the car down planted on the ground uh above 100 miles an hour so so these cars stop what what was the power and the top speed because it wasn't 600 horsepower no it was a 45 horsepower originally in this car um and i remember the days back in college when i was with you um when i was looking for things like you know 10 10 percent more power i'll put some diluto carbs and i put a a bigger like bug pack exhaust on it and now it's like 65 horsepower so you know you were pushing five percent 10 like improvements and the thing is with electric power is you know back in petrol days um it was you know you're chasing more power more power more power but with electric you're not chasing more power you've actually got too much power it's all about traction with electric yeah so we're not chasing more power nowadays it's just like how on earth do we get this amount of power down to the ground so that's what i've been concentrating on lately what's the battery pack in this so we've got uh 12 lg cams they're about 60 volts um each so we've got six in the front six in the rear yeah that's about 32 kilowatt hours okay so essentially this pack here is in parallel with the pack in the rear which is behind the back seats yeah so you've got about 16 kilowatt hours in the front 16 kilowatt hours in the back and it's it's really like you know mounted low down as well so this is between the axles but it's actually mounted on the floor so the the weight is really nicely you know low down so going around corners it's lovely and having a bit of an additional weight on the front of a beetle it's a good thing isn't a bad thing right now because uh the the old problem with the beetles was it was like a 60 40 weight distribution so there's too much weight on the back yeah and when you went into a corner if you didn't transfer the weight a little bit forward to be able to grip the front tires when you were pushing that push it would understeer yeah and if you corrected it too much it would snap oversteer so you it like oh i've got no nothing and then you floor it whoa too much now with this i've got something like uh i think something like a 54 46 weight distribution which is pretty darn good yeah so now it goes around corners like somewhere else yeah and and the weight doesn't change as the fuel tank drains right correct yeah so unequally i don't need to put a bag of sand in the front to be able to make it handle it like it did with my old 68 what else we got we got a charger in the front so this is a seven kilowatt charger um so this is uh you know what takes the ac power when you plug it in where's my plugs up that side isn't it so when you when you plug it in there very cool so seven kilowatt charger uh also got a dc converter in here so that's essentially taking the high voltage of the main battery pack and it's taking that down to 14 odd volts to charge up the 12 volt battery which is just underneath that panel there you can't quite see that um that's one of the high voltage connections so that's just connecting the batteries that are in there to the rest of the high voltage system do i spy some porsche brakes you do indeed well spotted so and support your wheels by the way yeah yeah you've got to have some wide wheels on this otherwise you know 600 horsepower with original beatles wheels and tires yeah would be hilarious frightening so you got porsche 997 brakes on the front uh we've got some uh wheels um off a porsche i can't remember which one probably a boxster or something like that but uh they're seven inch on the front nine inch on the rear and some yokohamas which have seen better days now because i've ruined them how would you ruin them mate i've not seen these traction issues traction issues those seats are lovely they aren't they they're absolutely beautiful they're carbon fiber as well yeah carbon fiber seats uh polished aluminium frames on them so again they're nice and lightweight because i just wanted to something that will hold me in place but equally you know was nice and lightweight yeah they're adjustable front and back and the fact that you can do that means that the kids can get in the back when they're brave enough yeah so you take the kids to school in a 600 horsepower beetle yeah or you go shopping again this although this is like hyper car fast yeah i don't drive it like a hyper car yeah i drive it to go and get the bread from the shops and you know just drive it normally yeah yeah and on decent days i'll drive to work yeah yeah this is for me the bit that because this car's been around quite a bit while we were filming last year and in bits most of the time i've had this car um five years yeah um originally i put a dual motor set up in here so there was like a two induction motors one on top of each other um i did that oh about four years ago something like that i bought this car for 300 quid so seriously when i bought it um you could stand in the car and your feet would be on the ground because there was so much rust inside the floor pan and rotted away and literally one one foot would be on rust the other foot would actually be on the floor so it was a project yeah 300 quid so but we had to do a lot of work on it to um sort out the bodywork uh get it restored to this extent yeah but then when i put the 600 horsepower as i'll say in a minute there's a lot of strength to me uh yeah because this car had 45 horsepower he's never designed to take this right before i show you the money shot yeah let's just cover off some other bits and pieces so lightning again so alexander windows yes aerodynamics at the back now this little kick spoiler here doesn't look like much but it has a hell of a like impact above 100 miles now i've driven beetles and drag raced them and above 100 miles an hour they really become like light yeah it's horrible quite frankly but this i've done 140 on this um on a runway a couple weeks ago um and at 140 miles an hour it just felt like a you know a modern beamer on the motorway solid planted i could let go of the steering wheel and it was just lovely so yeah 140 miles an hour before i ran out of um from my bravery and bravery i've not known you run out of bravery mate so but yeah planted because of the aerodynamics so we got the air dam at the front this little spoiler here which it stops all the air coming down here yeah and wanting to suck up the rear like that yeah so having it to spoil the air like that it just you know it avoids that whole vacuum like secondhand you didn't think of like a big kind of 911 whale tail type thing they look rubbish come on then money shot bring it on aerodynamics uh covered off lightning and the business end so that is a tesla large drive unit out of a performance model s so that's giving me 600 horsepower and what's up it's about 650 newton meters of torque which is around about 480 foot pounds of torque in old money so those do you have to change the software to get them up to 600 because no no the um the difference between a normal tesla mode in my sensible car my my vw bus yes which we've seen on the channel already exactly so that's my sensible side that's 450 horsepower in a 1969 vw crew cab it looks exactly the same motor but the difference between that and a performance motor is the inverter so the motor is exactly the same yeah it's just the inverter that can cope with more amps so more amps means more power yeah so the inverter is different in their performance drive unit so off the shelf at 600 horsepower you can tune them to be higher but there's no point because you struggle to get 450 horsepower down to the ground let alone 600 so going bigger is just silly yeah like 600 isn't silly and i can see lots of strengthening bars and yes so this was something we definitely have to sort out so obviously with 600 horsepower or actually it's not the horsepower to talk with that amount of torques uh 650 newton meters of torque it literally just wants to rip this whole like back end of the car off so to be able to stop that from happening and you know get the traction down without this whole thing going like that we've got to strengthen it all up so you've got triangulation coming down here yeah and then going underneath so the whole of the rear like motor if you like isn't mounted to the actual car itself it's mounted to this frame that we put in yeah and at the same time to stop things like stress cracks and uh stuff happening in these panels here we've actually double skinned them so these these panels here actually have a secondary skin in which you could probably see from inside the wing yeah which just strengthens everything up again wow so there's a lot of strength we've had to think about and put in place and these get triangulated up into a very strong place in the body and obviously you've got frame rails coming out from underneath in the floor pan and they've been strengthened and triangulated as well so what you have down there you can't quite see it but basically you have two frame horns coming out like that and in the old beetles when i was dragged racing them you used to get a little problem of the engine used to not twist them like that yeah so what we've done is we've triangulated these two frame horns up here and up there so essentially there's no way they can flex now because essentially they're just triangulated so we've strengthened those as well so the whole back end is locked in place the motor's still rubber mounted so it's not like hard mounted so it's still on rubber mounts but it gives us the best chance of the whole end rear end not getting ripped apart yeah talk to me about drive shafts what do you know apart from the fact they've broken a few well you used to you broke quite a few on the bus and that was 450 so yeah um so this is um got more torque yeah it's got wider tires and stickier tires it's lighter than the bus um so we went through a learning exercise in the drive shafts okay you snapped quite a lot yeah um so i think this is the third set of drive shafts now um so what what happens with driveshafts and cv joints is it's the instant torque so you got maximum torque so what newton means meters of torque from zero rpm so as soon as you plant your foot down snap um so you've got to put nice thick driveshafts on so the driveshafts that we have now are built to the same specification as tesla model s driveshafts yeah and that means you know nice and thick made out of very strong metal but also the heat treatment is extremely important so these actually go off um to there's only one company in the whole of the uk that do heat treatment to that specification so they go off to heat uh treatments and then they come back and then we attach um porsche 930 cv joints so a beetle cv joint is probably about yay big a porsche 944 cv joint or type 2 or vw bus is slightly bigger and the porsche 930 is bigger again so whenever the cv joints go up that's small strength and what we've also done is we've got race spec port 938 930 cv joints which means that the the cages on the cv joints are built out of you know something very special an obtaining it exactly it's not even chromoly it's something above chromoly i forget the name of it now um but the whole cv joint is um a race spec cv joint that's uh made for the um uh the baja races and people like that in the states um so and i've not been able to destroy these yeah i've tried well so far they are moggy proof like if something's moggy proof that's pretty impressive yeah exactly there should be a stamp like intel inside it should be moggy and that's there's some branding there for you my friend yeah exactly so so that so far that they're okay they've uh but you know the days the day is but young that is yeah well should we um see if we can break them no no you need to be on a track to be able to break yeah exactly so the the car will break traction before they break these but at some point i do want to have a good old go at trying to break them good but not today no [Music] i've taken my brave pills and i got my big boy brave pants on you notice we're getting old men we have to make noises as we actually get into this and when you get out yeah and all your knees start cracking oh my dear so sadly obviously we're in covert time so we have masks on anybody who complains because we've got masks on you can do one right now maybe you've got a branded one i just look like some you need some electric classic cars branding i look like like a nurse like i should have brought my nurse's costume oh no hang on no no that's a different that's a different film mate that's a different film um now i'm going to uh freely i've never been in a beetle before yeah it's my so no clutch just put your foot down and away you go no power steering it's man steering proper steering proper steering and that's it uh suspension-wise we've lots of things we've done on suspension uh so to make it handle well first of all it's a 1303 yeah uh beetle that is so a 1303 hazmat first and strut suspension on the front yeah a lot of beams um suspension yeah so you're already starting with some suspension which has the ability to handle better than the beam suspension yeah the beam suspension is pretty good but the first one's better so we've got um eye bass springs on the front adjustable perches um bilstein shocks all around yeah bigger anti-roll bars front and rear um yeah so we've gone to town on making sure that the suspension is up to the job of going around corners yeah and what range would you get out of it in terms of there's a difference between how you drive it like just like any car what range would i get out of it or what would a normal person get out of it all right so 20 miles range that's good yeah yeah it's not a good day and about 50 mile range on the tyres now if i drove it normally uh just sitting in the traffic and like driving normally let's say probably about 125 to 130 mile range okay it's not bad um it's only got a 30 kilowatt hour battery pack yeah yeah um which is you know the problem is the the right foot it's always been a problem with me yes my right foot is much heavier you probably see me walking with a limp just because my right foot is much heavier than my left foot yes so at any one time you can just put your foot down and it just goes i always have to look at the speed as soon as you do that you literally go [Music] old beetle stalled up next to me you're kind of looking out for oh look there's a nissan gtr hello goodbye wow geez that's cool yeah so but the handling's great as well so i mean if i come up to this round right here now and hopefully there'll be enough traffic i can show you how it handles as well because yeah it's just lovely so i'm going to this round about you know a nice speed and just oh it's it's like a go go you come out of the roundabout but it'll be on your roof spinning around what's going on the one thing you can notice is the wind noise because the the body shape wasn't designed to be going this fast right now uh at 140 miles an hour in that runway a couple of weeks ago i thought one of the windows was open one of the questions since the tv show came out lots of people saw you know you put these electric motors and said it's not just that it's all the other things around you it's the it's the braking it's the handling it's the balance and that's why these cars end up being so much better it's like some of all their parts yeah exactly a lot of people concentrate on the performance aspects of electric cars because they're numbers that impress people yeah but it's very difficult to get over on a piece of paper or a camera how well a car actually performs yeah you know the old top gear sort of like slide it around the track it's rubbish i mean nobody buys a car because it slides smoking tires around but it's impressive on camera yeah but how do you get get over to people that literally it'll go around around about at 50 miles an hour like this like that that is absurd yeah nobody expects it especially at bmw x1 and then especially if you overtake him now nobody expects it then to just do that in a heartbeat that guy's face was absolutely brilliant mate wow you like it yeah do you want to go i'd love to have a go mate go ahead didn't have to ask you twice again no not really no [Music] right all right so this is my first beetle drive it's a good way to start just be gentle with the throttle that's what i'm saying because although this is a beetle it's actually hyper car quick yeah so just be gentle until you're used to it with the accelerator but apart from that have fun i don't know if to get in the passenger seat i just like wait on the side of the road it's definitely getting always getting overlooked i see we remember the steering being mildly heavy it's better than going to the gym but once you get going it's fine but you can drive like miss daisy like no problem but as soon as you know you've got there that's unbelievable it's it's amazing that's about five or ten percent oh yeah you just you're just struggling stroking them yeah yeah yeah if you floor it you'll be it's easy it's funny because the drive lots of very very fast cars and you a lot of them will drive quite nicely but if you just smash a throttle you're going to get into trouble but this feels like if you smash it you really are really are going to get into it yeah yeah but yeah do you use these cars almost like a test bed for the customer cars yeah so with my cars i try to push the technology because with a customer car you never want to push the technology because essentially it might impact a little bit on the reliability but also on the time frame of a project customer so you always want to do your r d and your test beds just go straight on yeah um on your own vehicles yeah so with this i thought right let's push it let's see from a performance point of view how much we can push it [Laughter] we'll bleep that bit out hey it's good at it that is unbelievable i'm gutted we've got masks on because the look on my face then was probably you just got the whites of my eyes going you saw your mask drop a little bit as your mouth opened what a thing it's an absolute weapon on the road once it was used to it you're used to how much power you've got and also the limit of the handling yeah this will just blow away anything on the road so this having driven the ferrari this feels way faster than that oh yeah go go round round about again and floor up the hill because then you'll get the full impact of the torque up a hill as well yeah so this this is oh there we go a bit of traction control wow you know yeah and that's just a it's quite progressive actually yeah it wasn't it's a tiny tiny bit but mate i mean this is so much faster than the ferrari and i thought that was great well the uh ferrari got that volt 60 down to 2.7 seconds um and that's with a 450 horsepower motor in it this um if i sort out the traction get stickier tires on and take it to a track it should do naught 60 in about two seconds but i need sticky tires to do that because power is not what it's about at the moment it's about traction yeah yeah so with these road tires on not 60 3.2 seconds repeatability bang bang bang every day of the week just not 3.2 no problem as long as it's not bad but to get it lower than three seconds and quarter miles in the tens it needs stickier tires on this car in the wet must be hysterical and it's quite a handful well thank you for letting me drive i didn't honestly uh expect to ride because i know it was a right handful so um i appreciate that very much it's wicked do you like it i do very much can't have it i've wanted to get this car on the channel all the way through filming when it was in bits and there was wings on the shelves and stuff like when that's back on the road i'm gonna get it on the channel so mate thank you very much that's right do you want to do another 60. we should do yeah we should do you driving it okay [Music] there's a bit of traction off the line there that's outrageous spinning the tyres at the uh start there well that was a good way to finish the film my friend i did like mate it's just good good to be back in wales it's always good to be back in wales it is mate it is and with silly cars like this on the road it is it's uh it is fake well guys i hope you enjoyed that if you have done so please give me a thumbs up comments below are always welcome if you haven't done so already please subscribe to petrified for plenty more content electric classic cars all their instagram and social details follow these guys amazing cars going through the workshop at the moment that's all i need to say why else am i invent um but yes wicked thank you man no problem guys you take care we're still alive we are still alive only just here drive safe everyone [Music] you

Channel: Petrol Ped

Views: 854,293

Rating: 4.8894324 out of 5

Keywords: Petrol Ped, Vlogger, YouTuber, Cars, Supercars, Performance Cars, Motorsport, tesla, tesla beetle, vw beetle tesla conversion, vw beetle, vw beetle modified, vw beetle engine swap, vw beetle restoration, electic beetle, electric beetle conversion, electric classic cars, vintage voltage, vintage voltage electric beetle, how to put a tesla motor in a car, performance beetle

Id: DXGKt8sK8CQ

Length: 27min 10sec (1630 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 12 2020

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