How To Convert A Gas-Powered Car To An Electric Vehicle

This is a 1976 BMW 2002. Really fun to drive car but underpowered. This particular customer decided that he wanted to go what we call the whole hog, and he's doing the 550 horsepower Tesla drive unit in this. This is a typical car that we like to do. We're a speed shop. We love high horsepower. We love to make a car like this that's already fun to

drive super fun to drive. In San Diego, California this shop specializes in custom electric cars. EV West is part of a growing trend of converting gas vehicles to EVs and it's not alone. All over the world, enthusiasts are trading in their internal combustion engines for the power and efficiency of electric. This started out as a 1977 Porsche 911. He's melded both Tesla and then other aftermarket

components and able to build into a conversion. Interest in electric vehicles is at an all time high, with sales of new EVs up 55% in 2022 compared to the year prior. We will probably hit about 1 in 10 cars sold in the U.S. Having a plug. For a new powertrain in 10, 12 years, that's pretty substantial. Hybrids did not get to that number. And regulatory mandates

are only hoping to accelerate adoption. Places like California and many European countries are saying no more gasoline light-duty sales of new vehicles shall be sold by such and such a date, 2035, some are later, a few are earlier. But there are a lot of gas cars still on the road today and there will be for a long time. There are about 1.2 billion vehicles on the

planet now. And for the U.S., the average vehicle on U.S. Roads is now 12 years old. EV conversions could be a solution to get more internal combustion engine, or ICE, cars off the roads. Both the shops and aftermarket community are growing substantially to meet the new demand. All these component suppliers are going to come out and have these kits so that you can convert virtually any

vehicle that's on the road to EV. Being involved in electric cars right now is like being involved in computers in the 90s. We want this transition to sustainable fuels to be fun and exciting for people that are a part of car culture and automotive enthusiasts. The history of modifying and hot rodding cars goes way back to the 1940s. This industry really started in the 40s after

World War II, where a lot of our army soldiers came back but had had training in aerospace and those sorts of things. They started to make hot rod parts to make cars go faster. Today we've got a younger generation that's hot rodding EVs. Much of that community is about performance first and foremost. That's why some of the very first EV conversions were done. One of the

earliest EV conversions was an electric drag racer. White Zombie. It was a Datsun 1200 from about 1971, tiny little thing. And he put enough batteries in it with high power delivery that he just trounced everybody at drag strips. No one believed it. In the early days, purpose built electric vehicle components didn't exist. Once Tesla came onto the scene, conversions were mostly being done with salvaged batteries

and motors from its cars. When the EV conversion market started, it was really taking a wrecked Tesla and taking all the components out of it and putting it into your '69 Camaro or your Porsche that's behind me or any of those sorts of vehicles and hot rodding it with EV products. Today, the conversion industry is exploding with everything from DIY enthusiasts to custom shops. It's much

easier nowadays to build an electric car than it was just ten years ago. I'm the son of a hot rodder who grew up in Hollywood and have just always been fascinated by cars. EV West was the formation of having that love for car culture and crossing it with a freshly minted computer engineer who was looking to do some more exciting things with automotive. Michael Bream founded

EV West in 2009 as an experimental shop to explore the performance capabilities of electric vehicles. All great companies have great founding stories and ours was basically let's just build a race car. We rented the space here and started working on our first electric car project, which was a shop owned project. We had a little bit more focus on the hobbyist market, but very quickly it was

apparent this was much bigger than our initial plans. Today, Bream and his team are converting classic and specialty cars to electric, one of the many shops that have popped up to meet the growing demand. His has gotten to be so popular it has a 4 to 5 year wait to get in the door. We're in a real heavy growth pattern, double digit percentage growth every single

year, year over year. Now we're working with shops that we've helped bring into the business as authorized installation centers. The shop handles every step of the conversion, generally using components salvaged from crashed EVs. These motors here have just been pulled out of cars. From here they're going to go next door, we're going to run them on our test stand and qualify them to be resold to

maybe half or one third of it. So it does require us to open up the enclosure, rearrange the battery pack appropriately to the right voltage, and then offer that as a system component. EV West is now supporting the aftermarket DIY community as well, developing and selling its own components. We always like to add functionality to a product. So in the early Tesla cars, they failed to

put fuzes on their battery monitoring systems. So this aftermarket PC card that we built adds the fuzed protection to it on our aftermarket BMS. So it's actually a little bit safer to operate than the factory Tesla BMS. A quickly growing segment is DIYers who are taking these projects on themselves. The complexity of electric vehicles can be intimidating, but that hasn't stopped 14 year old Frances Farnham,

who is working on converting a 1976 Porsche 914. Okay. Welcome to the Tinkergineering 914 studio. This is where I've been working on my car these past couple of years. Everything is out of the car except for the steering wheel and we took out the transaxle in the engine bay. We redid that. And what I've been doing currently is I've been trying to get this nut off

in order to be able to take off this suspension and restore it. Frances got the car three years ago and has been documenting the process on her YouTube channel, Tinkergineering. I've always wanted an electric car and my mom has a BMW i3 and I always thought that was so cool. I had originally had the YouTube channel and then when we thought of the idea, Oh my

gosh, we should do a car on this. We should make it electric on this channel. Because the name is Tinker Engineering put together. And so we're like, Oh my gosh, that fits so well. And it fit into our mission statement to inspire other kids. And so my dad was like, Yeah, let's, let's do it. She just finished priming the car for paint and is getting ready

to rebuild it. A 914 internet community has been instrumental in helping her and her father through the whole process. As we were taking it apart, I found this blog on the internet and it was this guy who had converted a yellow 914 to electric. That's how I met my first and like probably one of my number one mentors, Mark Brems. Without him, I wouldn't have been

able to do any of this at all. To learn how to work with electric systems, she took a course with Legacy EV that taught her the ins and outs of doing a conversion. I just went during my spring break and it was honestly really, really cool. And they have all the parts there and that taught me how to attach all the components together and make sure

that everything worked properly. I got to learn how to program stuff. I had previously not known anything and my plan was like, Oh, I'm just going to wing it. It can't be that hard. I'm so glad I took that class because I would have electrocuted myself within 15 seconds. Leveraging her YouTube channel, Frances has been able to use sponsorships to help her cover most of the

costs for the repair. She's hoping to have the car ready by the time she is eligible for her learner's permit. Hopefully before my school lets out, I'll be able to have this painted. Then I'm just going to put everything back in, make sure everything works. And keep up with my partnership with 914 Rubber. So I'll make videos of their parts and then they'll send me the

parts. And so I'll be able to put those parts into my car. Then it's just the electric components, which shouldn't take too long. And then I have a fully running car. The aftermarket ecosystem is blowing up with EV focused components to support people like Frances who want to build their own electric car. Now what's happening is there's a lot of manufacturers showing up with electric motors,

with battery packs, with components, with harnesses to convert a older ICE engine, or an internal combustion engine, into the EV market. Both Ford and GM offer aftermarket components for EV conversions, and there are several other companies entering the space as well. Both Ford and General Motors have what we call crate motors being developed, but there's all these other aftermarket manufacturers that are doing those sorts of

conversion kits, and we're really fostering that. SEMA, the Specialty Equipment Market Association, is a trade organization that represents automotive manufacturers and resellers. We help manufacturers develop products, take them to market. SEMA represents 7,000 or so companies, but the automotive aftermarket is about a $51 billion a year industry. It holds an annual business trade show in Las Vegas that attracts 160,000 people in the aftermarket community. In

recent years, it has seen the number of EV focused products grow exponentially. We started two years ago at SEMA with having an EV section at the show. It was 2,000 square feet. This last year it was 22,000 square feet. I'm sure in the next five years it'll be 100,000 square feet. To support the aftermarket community, SEMA introduced a bill called SB 301 before the state of

California to try and provide incentives for people converting gas vehicles. If you buy a brand new EV vehicle, there's a rebate available. But currently there is no such thing for somebody that wants to convert their vehicle. So SEMA is sponsoring that bill to get conversions a rebate of $2,000, and we think that's just a start. I have heard a number of people say, okay, the used

car market, two and a half times as large in the U.S. As the new car market every year. Why can't we convert those to electric? And the answer is you just don't get very good electric cars. Due to the size and weight of modern battery packs. A car originally designed for a gas engine will never be as good as one designed from the ground up to

be electric. You have to break the battery into multiple pieces of a few hundred pounds apiece. One in the trunk, maybe one where the gas tank went, maybe one under the rear seat, one in the engine compartment. And because of the custom engineering needed for each build, it is likely to be too cost prohibitive to go mainstream. The engineering is sufficiently different that I just don't

ever see it happening at scale affordably. A typical conversion for an electric classic car would be about 20 to $30,000 for the parts and components. And then if you're going to have a shot professionally install that you're looking at about another $20,000 to $30,000. So on average, about $40,000 to $60,000 plus your classic car is about the going rate for a conversion. But for certain specialty

vehicles such as street sweepers, bucket trucks, garbage trucks and others, conversions could make sense on a larger scale. Some of those vehicles have really long lifespans. We're talking 20, 25 years and they go through 2 or 3 diesel engines in that period. Is there a possibility of saying, especially if they're incentivized, is there a model to convert them somewhere in the middle of their lifecycle to

electric as well? And some companies are starting to talk about the fact that it actually wins them consumer and public acceptance points too. And it could actually end up being cheaper for fleets to operate, especially with the complexity surrounding diesel vehicle regulations. Fleet buyers pencil it all out. They build a spreadsheet. They're saying, What does it cost to buy? How much is the fuel? Electricity always

wins there. And what's the annual maintenance? And so if you have a cheaper fuel or energy source and you only need 20% of the maintenance on the vehicle, you can justify over its lifespan a higher annual cost. But the biggest business opportunity that bridges the conversion space and the EV market is knowledge on how to work on them. The vocational side of this is incredibly important.

They're really struggling to attract younger people into vehicle mechanics as a career. SEMA spends a lot of time doing education work and has recently begun offering courses teaching electric vehicles. We have an education team here that talks about a lot of subjects. The next piece of that for us is going to be definitely education on EV. As an early pioneer in the space, EV West has

had people visit from all over the world to observe and learn from them. Poland, Japan, Chile, Colombia, Mexico. I mean, I could go on and on. We've literally had people come here from all over and have gone back to their countries and started, based on our business model, their own EV conversion shops. It has reached so much interest over the years that it partnered with a

local nonprofit, the EV Learning Center, to create curriculum to train people. The Electric Vehicle Learning Center is a STEM school that covers all aspects of electric vehicles. We have courses for children, we have courses for adults, and we do programs where we reach out to schools in the community as well. We've so far have sold out of every class that we've put on there. We literally

can't keep up with the demand. And other similar institutions are popping up elsewhere. I also just heard about an enterprise here in New York that combines the build it yourself, sort of DIY EV, with training younger people to be EV mechanics. And all of those people will have jobs because the adoption curve for EVs is going to be really steep and there will be mechanics needed.

I never thought people would be so enthusiastic about just a girl converting a car. Seeing all these like, you know, even the kids faces light up and then people are like, woah, I want to keep helping you because I really love what you did here, here, here. And so I'm like, whoa. It's just it's shocking. I hope what I'm doing with this is I'm proving that

it's not too challenging and that you can't do this because you need to be this old. You need to have this much money. I'm just doing this in my backyard with my dad. When you're involved in electric cars, you know that the success is guaranteed. How long the transition is going to take is really the only thing we're talking about now. And are we going to

make the transition to sustainable fuels fun and exciting for people along the way, or is it going to feel more like a chore? Well, we want it to feel more like a fun hobby.