Here’s What we Found Inside a Tesla Conversion Shop

hey guys Richard rich rebuilds here and a few weeks ago I took a trip to California to visit my friend Simone to work on a really cool tesla project together checkout cheese Louise her electric cheese safe car and sit down with Jill Rogan for three hours to talk about robots my stand-up career and again Tesla now while I was out in California I wanted to see what the electric vehicle scene was like out there and one of my stop was to visit Michael at evey West one of the West Coast premiere Evy conversion shops I want to get a closer look as to how an e V conversion shop is run current projects like his Tesla powered Porsche and several other VW offerings and what the future looks like for his shop so hit that subscribe button and let's talk to Michael and see what he had to say alright here we go we're live look busy Michael so let's just see what kind of operation you have going on here because I heard so many things about you online it's awesome to actually come here and see what you guys have going on in person I know you guys are the West Coast place to go effectively for any kind of evie conversion so tell me what you have in your shop what's in your shop today what's the plan for now what things you have in the works and what's the plan for the future so see our shop here we're obviously a classic car shop heavily on integrating the Tesla parts mainly because the value right you're able to buy really expensive high quality engineered parts at a fraction of the cost of new ones so that's where our kind of Tesla tie-in is and with you you know wrecking all the Tesla's to bring the parts in right right right right I need some of the other bits that we don't I do I Denny a lot of literally just pretty much charger batteries and my motors right out for the most part accelerator pedal some few other smalls but other than right now for the most part we passed the car along right point it's like recycling yes it's the best form of recycling because you're not like destroying it and trying to make something else out of it you're just like hey I'll use that as is push the whole reversible conversion not making any permanent changes to the chassis the body or anything like so you see a lot of those in here over here we have Ewan McGregor's 1954 oval window beetle obi-wan Kenobi obi-wan Kenobi I know him as a motorcycle guy yeah but most of the younger folks know him as obi-wan Kenobi but you can see in here this is all bolted into the factory transaxle the side plates or in the engine tin gasket we still have some work to do with some upholstery and some finish work but the main thing is there's no metal cut back here right so it's all original and the original gas engine can be put back in and you know put - its kind of restored condition right you can see we've got some Tesla modules in the back there we've got some Tesla modules in the factory location up front some safety wire and cut off BMS internal fuses so we really try and replicate what Tesla does with the batteries by putting an internalized BMS and monitoring systems as well as fusing our transaxle base kit so that's a more stock power stock setup right and then we have our test submarine I think I want to see this one a lot more detail so this whole carrier right here bolts in it's got an enclosed LG Chem battery pack front and rear we have a combined 32 kilowatt hour it's got the BMS and the contact was all in there and then the drive unit sits in here with our you know all the replaceable parts and parts and the mounting architecture we have the 930 CV flanges so you could just kind of unbolt this whole thing right out Ariana - we put it in fact you try to see the marks here from the table we'll put it on the table rule the table in and drop lift on it write an installation time of the actual hardware is only about five minutes when we're done with this kit this is gonna be the big 10 the kit right now you're gonna have a box up front you're gonna run some cables to the back and some signal wires right and you and a friend should be able to convert a 911 in the weekend I'm gonna put it to the test and it's Dennis Tesla power - right so yeah because the thing that we keep from our porsche friends is there they keep getting beat and stoplight to stoplight races priceless right so yeah we have the battery box in the rear for the LG Chem and we also have the the rear subframe for the with tufsa drive unit so you also sell a box up front yeah we can show you we'll bring this car down okay the rains let up so awesome yeah Ritchie brought us right I know I did the rain dancer I got here all right yeah and then you know again it's a lot of little small stuff the little cool imported Apter and the hi I'm on the side and a lot of the little things that it takes to kind of take a factory mounting system the Tesla uses and make it a little bit more small and compact to fit in more applications gotcha and then what's the deal with this one right here this is not a this is no this is not Tesla this is a Reinhart controller on top of a actual this has an e d West motor in it we were kind of manufacturing your own motors for a little bit yeah we're not really doing that anymore because we've just decided it's better for us to focus on the engineering and the whole kind of solution and we've got some really good motor manufacturers as our partners and so this was just kind of like a test that it was done in his internal project and now it seems like pretty much everybody that has a Porsche wants more power and so we're absolutely going because those cars are powered from the start yeah right this system as is parts wise is about twenty thousand dollars in a fully furnished Tesla system is about 23 24 right so there's not that much of a difference especially when this Peaks it about a hundred kilowatt and this peaks at about 400 kilowatt so it's it's you know bang for the buck it's tough to sell a system like this oh this one yeah when I get off it came around there's a vanity plate that covers all this stuff I wouldn't hide this with all this it's pretty faint times well so this is an air conditioning systems typically what we wouldn't put into cars is very sexy but right yeah the nice thing is is typically these older cars especially this thing in 912 has the four silver no one would really commend an air-conditioner because it run with much power yeah right it robs the power and overheats the engines air-cooled engine to begin with so once you go electric all of a sudden you're like oh I can do electric power steering assist electric heater a large air conditioner you can have a lot of these conveniences of modern cars just by having the four hundred volt battery in there right so in our next day this is a sixty three single cab was done by Tim Levin tree he's a great vintage painter all the logos on this are original so they were all there when we picked it up a lot of more Sun faded so he brought in Tim to kind of darken up some of the original painting and then we just we kind of wanted something company like so this is a ripening truck this is as modern as we get for a company truck really cool so what's the plan for this one you gonna put on oh yeah so you can see we have the model three battery in the bed right in the bulb skateboard yeah well you know you got a point of building electric vehicles right so we're gonna put the model three battery in the bed up underneath tucked away pretty good there's a lot of room in the single cabs and then we're doing the small rear Model S motor in this one so come on what yeah what we just got smaller how come not the the the large one large drive unit well for one it would require a little bit of cutting right absolutely don't want to modify okay cool all right for two you just don't need that much power we've done a lot of these applications we did a banks the other day hmm and playing around with it we ended up around 200 kilowatt peak output any more than that it's just too much you get tire spin and and it just doesn't really drive as well as they do when they're lower powered and you can get into the throttle and just feel more comfortable in the car so and I know like a lot of our customers sometimes get confused by that like wait you're putting this big unit and you're turning down the power and it's yeah the the unit was designed for a 5,000 pound car and you put it in this lightweight car and the throttles like they're all right the only flipside to that it's really just turn down the power detune it a little bit you know say except more fun still tons of burnouts and spinning the tires and all the fun stuff be like no all right we have a little machine shop in here a couple C and C's and it's mills and stuff this is a technicians cars and that technicians right here and that computer right right hey what's up and he's going off to intern with Tesla this summer he is Oh tell me more about that I see you have a pretty cool bench set up here what's this all about so the stuff requires a little bit of modification before you get in the car usually a firmware flash adjusting the regen there's different software on the motors so we want to match our controller to it it's really a confidence thing you've probably been through this you're doing your stuff and you're like that first time you see something spin so a lot of guys will want that experience and will want to set it up and run it on the bench right and we we get them to that point right away out of the box because they get a video emailed to them of their motor their serial number with their controller running on the bench we run it through all the paces like you know power output and the regen and all that a lot of these guys are buying them on the internet they don't even know to text if it's flooded or not somebody's off you tell me no absolutely and so we've seen everything in between every Brian from you know whatever inside and you know electrics you get it running the first time well you've got years of reliability at that point this is our warehouse where we know whatever you do what you do yeah Bart Tesla's here sometimes Ruislip RS tens of Tesla batteries you know 30 40 Drive motors and backup battery stock yeah LG Panasonic Sony you know all the stuff all right so what do we have here this seems to be like they're the Volkswagen Audi used to dust by the way we're kind of expanding so we've been doing some work over here right this is a personal car actually oh he did I think like my fourth or fifth personal conversion for myself you know I mean you got to do this for yourself right there's guys out there that you know want to do a conversion shop and they're so focused on a customer car but you know they really want to see what you want to do what would you do and so I've always loved baja bugs and so we put a twin motor in this because we wanted something super fast and this thing just it hauls the groceries pretty good we have a twin PBS AC 50 system back there and again it's pretty dusty but that's the way it should be yeah no kiddin it was to clean be an issue right but dust means you're not driving it you got to drive this thing we've been driving it man it's been jamming around we just took it to an off-road show we added the trailer hitch so we can haul motorcycles on it now and we can haul our energy trailer to Bampton a 1945 Bantam t3 trailer that we have 132 kilowatt hour Tesla battery in it oh is it on either side it's in our storage we have another facility across the street that's storage because we can't fit on our toys but tire poop Pinzgauer over there yep it's gonna be our over landing vehicle and then that's gonna run the trailer behind it for energy okay that way you get that way you have a source of energy to get out to the desert and then you can use the vehicle's battery to do all your over landing while the energy trailers recharging off the solar or whatever form of energy you want you said you hook it up and you get back you know so we want to give people the algorithm to go to the desert right over landing and off-roading all week and not have to worry about the charging or gonna range rains anxiety all two dirt bikes we made we took our power wall and write a very small version of that that we actually fit in the front of the Tesla me know yeah and now we've got a eight kilowatt fast charger in the front of the Tesla me know cuz you know we got these electric dirt bikes we're going to the desert and then we were running Honda generators right and the famous quote is wow this is the only dirt bike that makes noise when it's not running right by 1965 double-cab I elect refined it about three years ago I've got just to touch over 40,000 miles on it now Wow and yeah it just goes and goes and goes it's pretty fast pretty fun what's what's in it for power it's got it actually has the same system as this the 20 C 50 system so it does about you know 280 foot-pounds it to work somewhere around there that's pretty amazing books wagon transaxle its third anything really is the 63 single cab that's our in-house testbed for our bolton tesla system for the split windows right because everybody loves the split window I wanted something where we could take the Tesla power and easily bolt it in but still use the small battery because at the end of the day you don't want to be going fast in these we want to build quick vehicles but not necessarily fast because quicks fun and quicks a little bit safer right when your knees are the crumple zone not a lot of people want to go fast so it's kind of this unique little like characteristic that we're trying to find in there right and then driving these things fast without major suspension work really isn't ideal well that's the electric assist no J who doesn't have seatbelts on No well I thought he put something oh you definitely didn't I drove oh I love those air codes if they're ever-present anything like that it's really important to keep it original ya know I'm starting to think that's that stuff for you it has to be the overall theme I'm seeing here you kind of want to make it set the cars and go back to stock right if needed you know isn't it you know the whole goal here is to create a system the this car is like 60 years old right and nothing can be greater than having the same car like say 60 years from now yeah still on electric drive but all in its original condition right no and there's gonna be they are they stealing that were they doing that so everyone here one of the kind of unique things we do here is it pretty much every technician here has their own personal project going on right right you want people that are enthusiasts and have their own projects because that's how you get your own ideas for stuff and most of the learning we're doing on our own cars right because no one's really an expert or a professional in this field because the conversion equipment with the lithium batteries has only been around for like four or five years now right and so everyone's new and the best way to learn is to experiment and it's not cool to experiment on customer cars you know there's probably ten cars around the facility here maybe a few more than ten right that are all company owned that we're just doing you know it's kind of like our little smart wheelie car and all those little fun little projects it's nice that we have platforms to experiment on awesome everyone hope you enjoyed that episode Michael was a cool down-to-earth guy and I enjoyed learning more about his operations let me know what you guys stick in the comments section below and hit that subscribe button because later this week hopefully we can take a ride in his Tesla swapped bmw m3 stay tuned

Channel: Rich Rebuilds

Views: 343,082

Rating: 4.9501247 out of 5

Keywords: tesla, cars, teardown, mechanical, salvage, rebuild, how, to, fix, whats, inside, ev, repair, electric, vehicle, EV West, classic, conversion, BMW, Porsche, Model 3, VW, ev conversion, inside tesla

Id: zyzbz8JQfAY

Length: 15min 33sec (933 seconds)

Published: Tue May 21 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Ryan_0000]

Just saw this video a little bit ago. Looked up the company, and they offer a full electric kit for my 1973 VW Type 3 fastback. I can’t wait to convert it to electric.

[u/[deleted]]

I hope when electric comes and takes over, there will be EV shops everywhere and that EV conversions will be cheaper in the future...

[u/cbarland]

I'm good friends with the engineers at EV West. They're a really cool group and make some quality, unique builds.

[u/Namaewamonai]

Great video. It was cool to see inside EV West's shop. I can't wait to get busy with my own conversions.

[u/[deleted]]

We're gonna need some sort of infrastructure in place to convert ICE cars to EV in the near future, I hope these conversion kits become more and more common and affordable. People can't afford to throwaway perfectly good cars just because emissions laws change.

For the last couple of decades the EU and UK governments have been encouraging everyone to buy diesels because of lower CO2 emissions. Now they've done a 180 and are clamping down on diesels in all the major cities. There's gonna be some outrage if the government doesn't implement a scrappage or buyback scheme for worthless diesels.

[u/Madclem]

Great video, but I’m curious about the range of all these toys. ANy ideas?