Rebuilding A Tesla With A Camaro Engine

[Music] uh my name is rich and i run a youtube channel called rich rebuilds and on that youtube channel we just make a lot of really weird fun stuff so we started out with mostly doing evs we switched to gas and now we do both gas and evs and just have a really funny time it's funny once you build a repair tesla you kind of fix it you go from there there's no real upgrades for it uh so many things are electronically controlled it doesn't make it as fun for the hot rodders out there so i said to myself you know what how do we mix the two things how do we have you know a really good looking car and combining it with the tune ability of a of a classic v8 engine so we decided just to combine the two a lot of people think that oh you took a brand new tesla and tore the products like no no it wasn't a flood and tesla won't sell you batteries and motors to repair it so i said you know what if tesla won't then uh jennifer remoters will it was a camaro ss that was completely destroyed and the engine was available and uh decided to put it in the tesla for me it's one of those things where it has to do with recycling so they were both just like wrecked cars sitting in the field and i said why have them both just sitting there why not combine the two and make something that actually runs and functions so i spent the first few months actually stripping it down taking out all the interior components pressure washing everything and just getting all of like the stench and like the sewage out of the car so i took both motors out both motors were toast you ready water man there's tons of water in there the battery pack was pretty much toast because underwater for so long you know anything short of aluminum was shipped out of the car so i think a lot of measuring and prep was the hardest part making sure the engine sits straight and true in the car because don't forget not only do you have to have make sure the engine sits well in the car but there's also a transmission that adds another few feet and there's also a really long drive shaft that spins thousands upon thousands of rpm that are really sitting right between your legs that has to be straight as well like a lot of different angles and things have to be straight in order for the car to even roll down the road believe it or not it almost makes sense that the v8 fits so well once you take out the front motor there's so much room in there and the ls3 is actually so narrow it actually fit in there pretty well so what we noticed was that when we brought the car to sema we had the hood open everyone would just walk by it because the install was so clean it was only until they saw the tesla logo that everyone just kind of rubber neck stopped and went towards the car the exhaust fabrication process was interesting because battery pack for a tesla model s weighs about i would say between 11 and 1200 pounds so because the old battery was you know about four inches thick and so heavy and it tucked in so well underneath the car once he removed it and we made the exhaust system we decided to go with oval tubing because when you go with oval tubing kind of like nascars use you actually save a lot of space going oval versus completely circular so if you notice we have a side exit exhaust system most cars have a rear exit exhaust where it actually comes right under the rear bumper we couldn't do that because the independent rear suspension was so large the exhaust actually couldn't go past it so we just terminated the exhaust system right to the sides right before the the rear wheels [Music] one of the biggest challenges was the fabrication of the transmission tunnel you know in the tesla it's one of the few cars that are made it has a completely flat floor you know most cars nowadays that are rear-wheel drive there's a tunnel going from the front all the way to the back this one didn't have that so we had to make our own and it was it was definitely challenging uh so we have a great fabricator joshua that actually was able to cut the car in half down the middle and actually build a transmission tunnel one of the other difficult issues we went through with this car was the wiring so we completely stripped the car down to the bare frame it was just literally just a shell and we had to rewire the entire car all over again and we actually removed about 50 to 60 percent of the car's entire wiring harness but the battery pack is not there that's one set of wiring high voltage cables uh there was uh wiring to the rear motors the front motors those are both gone you know we saved a significant amount of weight going from the older lithium powered battery pack to the uh to the internal combustion engine the the car still has the touchscreen uh it still has the instrument cluster and all the functions work the navigation works the bluetooth works so when you sit in the car you could you know push buttons and play with different functions of the vehicle and it does work i am very satisfied with how it runs yeah we still need to do some fine tuning to it but at the end of the day when you sit and you drive it you i you almost forget that it's a tesla like you're just thinking that you're driving like a regular you know powerful v8 engine car it's it's it's really weird because if you don't think about it you're like okay this is pretty cool as a manual i'm doing my thing but you really have to take a step back and say to yourself this car never had any of this [Music]

Channel: Insider Cars

Views: 125,088

Keywords: Cars, Insider, Tesla, Camaro, V-8 Engine, Wacky Builds

Id: wJk8EEyNfvU

Length: 5min 52sec (352 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 12 2022