How I Built An Electric Tesla Powered Classic VW Bus

[Music] i just sawed through one of the brake lines this battery is completely dead i'm wearing rubber gloves just in case [Music] we're moving [Laughter] [Music] i'm louis cole and i'm converting my 50 year old van to fully electric by repurposing tesla parts and i'm doing this with zero experience as long as i can remember i've been obsessed with fun vehicles and road trips i bought my very first van on my 21st birthday put a hammock in the back and traveled around europe with my friends i've had a double decker bus that i lived in for three years a school bus and then a second double decker bus but in 2015 i finally purchased my dream van this has actually been my dream for like years tone of vw camper i explored montana before driving it all the way up the west coast and into canada with some of my best friends and it was truly one of the best summers of my life unfortunately there were endless engine problems that followed and the van ended up off the road and unused i even spent five thousand dollars for a complete engine overhaul only for it to immediately break down again so the van won't start louis just spent so much money getting this fixed and it's broken again the truth of it is these beautiful vintage vehicles are extremely unreliable and extremely expensive to maintain after spending six years traveling the world non-stop i've recognized that i have to do it more sustainably this has to start with finding inventive ways to get off fossil fuels and lessen my carbon footprint electric vehicles are the future yeah baby while i've always loved vehicles with real character i also love doing things that are unique and seemingly impossible i stumbled across someone who had converted their vintage vw but or selling it for 130 000 i was determined to see whether there was a cheaper way to do it after asking around and messaging a few people i found jehu garcia dm'd him on twitter and we arranged to me we have met up with joe who is the expert in converting campervans to electric and today we are going to i guess just learn a little bit about what it takes to convert a van to electric wow that's the motor right there it's like the size of a watermelon it's less than 100 pounds and it's got about 100 horsepower right where are the batteries it's about 48 kilowatt hours something like i mean some of these things you're saying i don't quite know what that means but i mean i guess we'll learn this is awesome there is sounds but that's it that's it that's it that's it started yeah this is completely silent so we're heading to evie west this is the premier shop for electric conversions on classic cars so i'm learning all of this as we're experiencing it but basically we use a lot of energy coming down it's gonna be like three hours charging to get the batteries back up to the level they were to get back again this is all really interesting because when we do start doing road trips and long distance things in my bus i need to learn about all of this eddie nice to meet you yeah nice to meet you man michael breme is a man who embraces both the past and the future he loves classic cars but only to a point so he retrofits them to connect to the 21st century i got into this uh from racing cars and then i wanted something a little bit more challenging and we built the e36 pikes peak car ran it at pikes peak we made press and then we started getting queries for work and then you know history yeah yes it's history this thing i only just saw it the delorean oh this is this is made today this is tony hawk's tony hawk's car it's fiberglass this one's amazing and uh with surface mount microfuses it's actually easier because we're just doing micro traces i have no idea what they're talking about this is so much more complicated than i thought it was going to be what an amazing world what an amazing one what are some of your favorite vehicles you got in at the moment well uh all the volkswagen products but by far and above the tesla powered 912 that's over there right now okay i'm i'm gonna go for a little spin in this electric porsche all right you i don't think i've ever experienced that kind of acceleration that's nice right it's uh oh probably the quickest accelerating car i've ever played okay we're back in venice we had an amazing day yesterday with michael down at evie west jehu is a legend both of them are legends and they're going to help us make this dream happen so i bought a tow bar and we're going to get the van down to evie west this like somehow [Music] a little bit more a little bit more height one inch getting the bust down there is in itself like a signaling that we are gonna do this you know i mean it's like it's down there now we can't turn back i'm gonna keep the speed momentum going because they don't actually know we're dropping it off i'm just gonna write on the louis windscreen luckiest we didn't wash this down first time i've ever heard that okay it's been a few months since we first came down here brought my van down and started this process of planning out how we're going to put an electric engine in my bus it's 20 20. we're ready to do this project now but we have just found out today we just arrived at ev west down san diego and we just found out today the original plan to potentially put a tesla engine in the bus it's gonna cause a lot of unknown obstacles and it could end up taking months and months and months if not like the whole year so i think after having a brief conversation that the better move is to go with a known setup and system that johou has done before and he can help us with i think we're gonna have a similar setup that he's done in this bus and talking about this bus we're gonna take it for a little spin this is gonna be my first time driving an electric camper van let's do this oh yeah okay did it go so it's in yeah do i need to put it in gear or uh it's already in third gear so you just have to take off the ring [Music] that's the problem with riding around so you you've dropped this right yeah i'm so confused with the gearing so it's in third can i stay in third or do i need to go all the time it's just like if you're on a super steep hill maybe the motor is not gonna have enough torque to get going you're fully loaded and steep hill okay to get going all right so you might have to but if i was in on the highway i wouldn't need to go into fourth you don't i drove all the way here um it's quite an adventure right this is quite an adventure it was a little scary way more power than the original engines have the big question for me is getting enough range to do some really good road tripping in it because actually having it to be practically useful like to drive around california is like a big important thing for me so i had to bolt this tow bar on just to get it down here jehu jay who's measuring up the underneath section to put the mount the battery so he's just going to see how many batteries we can fit in batteries equals miles so we'll make a box right yeah and the box will be sticking out here but we just this is just a pipe is it yeah we'll remove that one because it won't be if we use this basically you put two little modules back to back right like one here yeah and then another one and then another one there and then you'll put the ones in the back will be cross this side yeah we're going to try and get 12 of these underneath the whole chassis like the body of the bus but the danger is if something punches like we go over a bump or something like pierces the batteries they could all set fire so he's saying we need to like build like a metal box to slip them into so they don't it's you know so it's not as dangerous i just think we squeeze as many miles out of it as we can i think as long as i mean how much is each battery pack roughly depends right like i said so i think we cost it up basically and then figure out how much support sells them really expensive but we can find them in fact there's a guy just on the way here i'm just going to show you this bus that they're here now because it's very similar to mine it's like the high top it's a bay window basically this is what mine's gonna look like once we take the existing um combustion engine out and this is where the electric engine engine slots in there so we need to do all that work on mine i don't think i'm gonna get it looking as nice and neat as this to be honest but yeah it's cool to kind of see where where we're heading and then the engine the motor that i think we're gonna go with is called a hyper nine and it's the high voltage version which is going to be a bit stronger than uh jehu's and then we're going to mount the batteries underneath so i think in this conversion they're like mounting them on the floor so it's going to be a raised floor but i think we're going to build aluminium battery casing boxes and bolt them underneath to maximize the battery batteries we can put in there and hopefully get like a 200 mile range so we can go on proper road trips this is the motor that we're looking at getting it's the hyper nine is this the high voltage one no this is the this is the normal one right so we're getting the more powerful version of this all right yeah this feels this feels nice i can't wait to get it back on the road we have finalized a list of all the things we need to buy i'm going to get an email sent over the next couple of days and pay the bill it's a big investment i could probably buy a really nice car for that same amount of money but it's the future it's electric cars it's going to be cool i mean look at these look how epic they look and um yeah so i'm biting the bullet i'm doing it and then hopefully in the next couple of weeks we'll be able to start doing things i'm gonna try and sell the engine out the back the current engine which is broken and then yeah we'll get building i can't wait one of the biggest costs of doing this build is the batteries which is the tesla model 3 batteries model s batteries going through ev west was like their cut their price in the batteries was like pretty expensive so jay who sent me a link to this guy on ebay he's selling them for like a thousand dollars each but he had 15 available so i'm offering him to buy 14 for 10 grand which i think is like 700 and something dollars each which he's agreed to so we've just arrived and if they all check out okay like jay who's going to just test that they're all working fine we've saved ourselves six six thousand dollars in the bill so did you pull these out of uh a tesla wreck yep model s p 85 d so what we're looking for this is to be 24. yeah about 24.4 20. yeah you look great i'm excited this is the first thing we purchased so it makes me feel like we got some momentum we're actually going [Music] done yeah yep i love paypal today is officially day one of actually starting any work on the van i'm super excited i just sawed through one of the brake lines and it's now dripping brake fluid

Channel: FunForLouis

Views: 1,567,374

Keywords: daily vlogs, louis cole, funforlouis, adventure, travel, travel vlogs, bucket list, wanderlust, holiday, electric van, EV, electric conversion, vw t2, classic vw, vw bus, tesla powered, tesla, selt built

Id: Kg1TLvYyG6Q

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020