Is it a sin to convert a classic car to electric?

hi everybody Richard again here from Electric classic cars and today we're going to be having a little bit of a discussion about why people convert beautiful iconic classic cars like this to electric now it's fair to say it's a little bit of an emotive subject some people out there love what we do but others not so much and I would probably say I was in that camp not so long ago but having done what we do for what seven years now I'm definitely convinced that electric power plants in classic cars give them a new lease of life and don't really take much away from the classic car experience but let's get into it let's talk about the heart and soul of the car first the engine there she blows now here we have what people sometimes refer to as the heart or soul of a classic car which is the engine and in a series one E-Type Jag it's a 3.8 liter straight six it's got twin cams Su carbs and you know it's a lovely looking thing and it sounds glorious as well don't forget I used to be a petrol head and still have a massive appreciation for all types of cars but is it a sin to take this out and put in an electric motor so let's get into it pros and cons so one of the most common questions we get asked it shows is but don't you miss the noise and well okay on an E-Type Jag it's quite a glorious sound when the engine is uh bubbling away and revved up a little bit like a Spitfire flying over it's a lovely noise followed by a jet not so much but you gotta understand that you know it's only 50 of the cars that we convert you know I would say have quite a nice noise than the other 50 Cent are you know engines like a Fiat 500 engine which you know I don't think anybody's kind of said that's a glorious noise that comes out there or a diesel engine out of a Land Rover for instance so yes noise is something that you know is not there with an electric converted uh classic car but believe me you don't miss it and I'm talking from experience and it's always a good idea to listen to people that have experience not opinion so my experiences that there's so many other advantages that they far outweigh the fact that the noise is gone and anybody that's driven to Classic lemon in a 911 with open trumpets behind you and didn't put air Defenders on after about an half an hour you know knows what I'm talking about noise is great but there are certain limits so there's no getting away from it you know the sound of the engine does go when you convert it to Electric but the benefits far outweigh it now here's the big one and it's the one I don't get the most Soul why has this got soul but apparently this does not have soul this apparently has the ghost of James Brown in it because it's full of soul but this is a washing machine to some I've been into classic cars all of my life and I've never thought of an engine having Soul okay its Soul has leaked out over the driveway a number of times but I would say that they have personality but a soul is a stretch I think um and a classic car has a personality no matter what engines in it but for those that say this is the soul of a car please explain Below in the comments why has this got soul and this does not have soul and if you're going to say oh if you don't understand you know if you don't know you won't understand or whatever that's lazy I need an explanation why is this got soul let's talk about originality then because there's no getting away from the fact that when you take the original engine out of the car it's no longer how it was when it came from the factory but why is that such an issue because people have been modifying and improving cars classic cars since you're dot um an ACS is a perfect example aca's great car and then somebody came along and put a big massive American V8 in it and called it the AC Cobra kind of the same things we're doing here isn't it you know modifying and improving on the classic car design and the other thing is these are mass-produced vehicles I mean if you look at say a VW Beetle in front of me over there 26 million of those were made so you know these aren't like the Mona Lisa as people say oh you're painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa no there was only one Mona Lisa painted questionable there's a few apparently out there but um this is not a piece of art this is essentially something that should be driven and enjoyed piece of art you look at it and there's only one of them made so originality um yes we are doing something which is you know no longer an original car if you like but don't forget we're bolting in our conversions so the conversions that we do the motors and the battery packs they bolt into things like the engine mounts and you know the infrastructure of the car we're not cutting and welding and messing around with you know the original car and you know I've been in a hot rod scene quite some time and they definitely do that there so if a customer ever did want to actually bolt back in his engine and his petrol tank and exhaust Etc they can but of the 100 plus cars we converted in the past seven years not a single customer has done that now one subject always gets brought up is manufacturing batteries is environmentally bad well I've got news for you guys manufacturing anything is environmentally bad I mean you've got to dig out the raw materials out of the ground and process it Etc to make anything in this world look at the cement industry and aluminum industry if you really want to look at very energy intensive processes but batteries the thing that always gets brought up is Cobalt and child labor and Link those two together with electric cars and okay there are child labor issues in the Democratic Republic of Congo and that they're you know their kids are getting used in Minds copper mines and all sorts of mines and also Cobalt lines but does ever get mentioned about other Americans no it's mainly Cobalt they concentrate on the other thing to bear in mind is Cobalt is used in the steel industry in other Industries including the petrochemical industry to desulfurize petrol to so you're making petrol you're also using Cobalt which gets used once and the other thing with batteries is they can get recycled so you can take the materials out and reuse them again but the main big headline to take away from Cobalt sort of things is Tesla and other manufacturers are already moving away or have moved away from using Cobalt and nickel because they're starting to use what's called lfp batteries which is lithium-ion phosphate so yeah Cobalt has has been used a lot in batteries in the past and will go into the future using them but obviously manufacturers like Volkswagen and Tesla are already going towards lfp batteries right another thing always comes up is weight surely when you put a battery in it's going to collapse the car because it's so heavy I think most people there are probably thinking about lead acid batteries in milk floats in the 1970s because when we convert a classic car to Electric the weight is around about the same at worst it's maybe a little bit heavier like maybe one passenger in it but usually its weight is the same but the other benefit with batteries is you can move the weight around so you can have a front battery pack and a rear battery pack and improve the handling of the car and anybody that also worries about weight is look at how heavy cars have become from the 1970s to where we are now cars have been getting generally heavier and heavier and heavier over the decades and has anybody ever moan about wait no it's only when electric cars came out which were a little bit heavier again but not by much now another big question we always get asked is how much does it cost to convert a classic car like this to electric and there's no getting away from it it's expensive very expensive to convert a classic car or any classic car really to Electric to a professional standard and to safety standards like r100 Etc it's an expensive thing to do I think the cheapest conversion we do is around about 20 000 pounds and I think customers have spent up to 120 000 pounds on converting a classic car to Electric there's a lot of man-hours in it a lot of parts um you know batteries Motors Etc so it's it's expensive to do this so that's all the cons if you like all the negatives let's see if I can persuade you on some of the benefits of converting a classic car to Electric right let's get into the benefits I think we should start with why I got into electric conversions in the first place I as you probably know already was a massive petrol head and I just wanted to follow the power and I put electric motor in a car put my foot down and just thought wow where has this been all my life so performance is a massive benefit for converting a car to electric and take this Defender for instance I mean the north 60 and this was measured in hours I think now with the electric Drive training the naughty 60s four seconds and if you've seen my own Land Rover Defender that's been tuned a little bit not 60 in three and a half seconds so it's fair to say performance is vastly improved when you convert a classic car to electric and it doesn't need to be insane or you know that's definitely the the flavor that I like but you can you know look at say a Fiat 500 just behind Tim there when we convert that to Electric okay that had a power in of what 12 14 horsepower whatever original engine we don't go stupid with the power in those but we do put a bit more power in so that you can safely drive around and keep up with modern traffic so performance is a definite big plus when you convert a classic car to Electric now I'm going to give you a clue as to what this next subject is all about by turning the key on the Jensen it still has its engine in oh dear nothing's happened reliability is this topic and it's fair to say um reliability is something you have to take into account with classic cars I mean me and Tim being into classic cars since we were 17 and you know you've had a fair number of classic cars yeah we've had our fair share over the years haven't we and you know reliability is not great with the classic cars because they're old and you know as I get older and certainly Tim gets older he becomes less reliable but you know with a classic car you know you have to have knowledge of how to you know look after that car and fix it but also some good mates to phone at 10 o'clock at night say Tim can you come pick me up it's broken down again and um you know since I've converted my own classic cars to Electric I've had 100 reliability out of it I'm not saying that because I do what I do I'm perfectly honest here I've had 100 reliability out of the crew cab for instance um which is six years ago I converted that to electric and it's been my daily driver and it just you turn the key and on it goes and you get on your journey and enjoy your journey and you know get on with your life so having something which is 100 reliable is a good thing right let's talk about maintenance now anything that is 50 odd plus years old is going to need high amount of Maintenance as Tim's wife has told me many times he's high maintenance so where the classic cars being converted to Electric it's still a classic car you're still going to need to maintain things like the brakes and other bits and pieces on it just not this bit and obviously this was the bit that probably took the majority of Maintenance um because you know look at it it's you know an inefficient thing it needs you know belts changing oil changes filter changes tune-ups you know what else is there I've I've forgotten how it plugs spark plugs you know there's so many things that you need to do to babysit this thing to keep it alive and you know performing to its optimal level or just like the Jensen just to get it started sometimes so the maintenance side of things is you know there's a lot less maintenance you have to do to a classic cars being converted to Electric because the majority of the maintenance um problem if you like goes away right for this next topic I'm going to need our glamorous assistant Debbie McGee or Tim as we like to call it all right going into you're gonna have to rev up this if I hold this on here all right that'll do it I'll do that'll do state that so let's talk about this stuff um essentially what comes out of here it's poisonous so a fossil fuel um petrol or diesel that's burnt in an internal combustion engine what comes out the tailpipes will kill you quite frankly and that poisonous gas if we re-routed that to inside the passenger cell you'd be dead within a few miles and that's not a good thing but equally what goes into the um fuel tank itself is not a good thing so actually digging oil out of the ground and refining it and shipping it halfway around the world then be taking it to a petrol all that is a bad idea so you know we're trying to move away from you know this poisonous death gas to a cleaner power source which is electricity and there's people on their sofas right now steam coming out there is going yeah you're just moving the problem down the power lines to the power stations Etc but consider this in the UK less than two percent of our electricity comes from coal and last week half the electricity produced in the UK came from Renewables so that is improving with time as well I mean uh two-thirds of our electricity in the UK comes from the low to zero carbons and nucleus included in that and as the years progress our electricity mix is getting cleaner and cleaner and cleaner but this the pollution coming out of this will always remain the same because when you burn petrol or diesel the pollutants are the same electricity getting cleaner so there you go massive environmental benefits to using and driving an electric car now earlier on we discussed that the cost of conversion is very high but there are Financial benefits as well which is the running costs because I I did a calculation a few years ago on my VW bus and I worked out it was 16 times cheaper to run that than when it was petrol and I was taking into account fuel maintenance costs and all the servicing parts and stuff like that and I added up like five years prior five years afterwards 16 times cheaper but bear in mind I've got solar panels and I'm also partial to a bit of free charging now and again but there's no getting away from it running an electric car is a lot cheaper than running a petrol car but as far as payback is concerned you're going to struggle if you're going down the the path of oh but when would you pay back Etc the conversion costs I'm not sure you would in a decent time frame because The Upfront cost is so expensive but again it's a little bit like saying oh that level low patio that you did in your house what's the payback period of that I didn't really do it from a financial point of view to you know get a payback I just did it because it's a good thing to do and there's so many other benefits but yep cost of running an electric classic car is definitely a lot lot lower especially if you've got a high maintenance high cost car like a Ferrari to start with searching a beautiful classic like this to Electric is where essentially future proofing it not just for future generations to enjoy and drive but I'm talking about lower Mission zones in cities at some point more and more cities are going to roll out low emission zones where they're going to either going to ban internal combustion engines or seriously seriously put you off driving into those areas and making it a beautiful classic like this electric well no problem you can drive in there and at some point in the further future petrol is going to become a very rare and expensive commodity as well and anybody that thinks synthetic fuels is going to replace that do the maths on how energy it takes to produce synthetic fuels because that ain't going to work a little bit like hydrogen so yeah we're going to Future proof Vehicles by converting them to Electric but for me the biggest benefit of all is the improved drivability of a classic car once it's been converted to electric and there's people out there scratching their head thinking how can it be a better Driving Experience when it's electric well I'll try to explain I mean there's no getting away from the fact that performance wise electric is much better and faster so performance is fantastic when it's converted to Electric handling is better why because we can move the batteries around us as ballast if you like to improve the weight distribution that the brakes are better because essentially you've got regentive braking from the motor so you've got better performance better handling better brakes instant torque for accelerating and overtaking and it's just an overall better experience and when you also add in you know the less stress because reliability is better you're not worrying about whether or not it's going to break down because there's a rattle or a noise Etc the whole experience for me is better but it's definitely one of those things you have to experience so there you go that's all the pros and cons I can think of I've probably missed out loads it's been a while since I've had a petrol classic car so I've probably missed out maybe some of the benefits and maybe some of the cons of um owning a petrol classic car but also EV guys whatever missed out benefit wise of like uh owning an electric car ever missed out anything there comments below let's have a discussion on it all and hope you enjoyed this episode and I'll see you on the next one [Music]

Channel: Electric Classic Cars

Views: 61,446

Keywords: electric car, tesla, classic car

Id: WeRO_GxaffU

Length: 19min 7sec (1147 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 21 2022