 Five, four, three, two, one. This is a 1968 Porsche 912 powered by a Tesla drivetrain. It's not just fast, it's the culmination of a years long boom in taking vintage cars and retrofitting them with EV technology. It's the brainchild of two guys. David Bernardo, the founder of Zelektrik Motors, a shop that restores old cars with a modern twist. And Michael Bream, the founder of EV West, which specializes in high performance modifications. Zelektrik started out as a personal project. I wanted to take a Volkswagen and make it electric. I would have liked to have done a bus, started with that, but they're crazy pricey. Back when we started, we could get a nice car for $7,000, $8,000, $9,000. So we got a nice ragtop and we're determined to make that electric. We started in 2010 and there was probably three or four years that the phone just didn't ring. The email inbox was mostly empty, but it wasn't really until these last three years or so that the public's really turned on to this. During that time, Tesla went from a kooky startup on the fringes of Silicon Valley to the most serious player in electric cars. As soon as Tesla came out, my interest grew in taking a classic car and making electric because their first electric car didn't look like an appliance. Michael and David have been working together for almost a decade now and have a growing list of happy customers and eager buyers. And that's let them take on more complicated and expensive builds like the Volkswagen Microbus. We get emails every single day from people all over the planet and it's their favorite vehicle. They want that to be electric. And I disappoint a lot of people because our focus is just Volkswagen's and Porsche's from the 50s and 60s. And that's keeping us super busy. It's keeping us all very, very busy right now. Our wait list to get in the shop now extends three to four years out. So we're booking appointments for 2023. Despite that increasing workload, Michael and David were eager to take on a bigger challenge. That's where the Tesla-powered Porsche 912 comes in. This customer brought it in, thought it was a fantastic project. A little bit of a challenge engineering-wise because the car is much smaller than the cars that we're pulling the components out of. A Tesla drive unit comes out of a 5,500-pound car and we're trying to shoehorn it into about a 2,300-pound car. The result of that engineering is 550 horsepower and 4,500 pound-feet of torque. The donor car was a Tesla P85 from which they pulled out the motor, inverter, the rear differential and even the throttle pedal. Zelectric doesn't use the Tesla battery because it weighs too much. Instead, they use a 32-kilowatt-hour LG Chem battery pack split into two 16-kilowatt-hour portions to balance out the car. This 912 will also lay the groundwork for future builds. EV West plans to sell a 912 conversion kit for roughly $50,000. There's a surprisingly long history of people tinkering with electric cars. But lately, the cost of the technology that powers them has gone way down, while the availability of the parts and the knowledge of how to put them together has gone way up. This has resulted in a boom of weird, cool and increasingly fast custom EVs. I had very low expectations because the electrified VWs I'd seen online were just Frankenstein's monsters. You know, they're filled with golf cart batteries in the back seat and strange motors. They really were bad. So I assumed it was going to be like that and that I'd do the test drive, it'd be interesting, but I wasn't going to buy one and was blown away. That's Paul Stone and his 1966 electric Beetle. He's one of Zellectric's first customers. The first time I drove it and got out onto the street and really stepped on the accelerator, it blew me away. In first gear, it'll throw you into the back seat. This isn't Paul's first time buying into electric drivetrains. He says he was one of the first Prius owners in California, and so the work that EV West and Zellectric are doing makes sense for him. But the idea of messing around with vintage cars and especially retrofitting them with EV tech isn't for everyone. You get two reactions. Either people think it is the greatest thing and great for repurposing an older vehicle, or it is sacrilege, blasphemy. I think part of the experience of having a classic car is to have the driving experience of a classic car. And it depends on what your needs and your wants and your desires are. In some ways, retrofitting an electric motor to a car that didn't have one originally, it defeats the purpose a little bit of having a classic car or having a vintage car, because most people who have those kinds of vehicles want the authentic motoring experience. And you can't get that with an electric motor in your Volkswagen Bug or your Porsche or any other car that you want to retrofit. If you've got a rare car, really rare car like a Porsche 901, one of the pre-911 Porsches, and you want to convert it to an electric car, it's yours, you certainly can do that. But you're diminishing the hobby by taking something very rare, something very important, and modifying it likely to the state that you couldn't... It would be very difficult to return to its original configuration. Michael and David say they try to construct their cars so they could be converted back, though they don't really expect that to happen. But Leslie Kendall's comments illustrate a larger point. Of course, some of the people who have spent decades, maybe even most of their lives, finding, restoring, collecting, tuning, and showing off vintage cars aren't going to like what shops like Zellectrik and EV West are doing. It goes past vintage cars, too. Electric racing series like Formula E have needed to work extra hard to prove themselves alongside traditional racing series. And while EV sales are slowly ticking up around the world, consumers in the US are actually buying more gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks in the near term. I think a lot of people think we take perfectly good running cars and convert them. And what we actually do is more along the lines of what happened with the 912, where you have a car kind of incomplete, kind of rusty, and it's right on the edge of maybe just going to the junkyard and being done. And these cars are great because they typically don't have the engines in them. You can get a good deal. And that's what we have here with this. The public in general is not going to jump through hoops to move a new technology forward. But if you make it a little bit easy, if you make it convenient, then that's actually a very good reason for the public to participate in moving forward that technology. The electric car revolution is not a shift that will happen overnight. But shops like EV West and Zellectrik and projects like the Tesla-powered Porsche are signs that car culture is starting to adapt to this new reality. And they have the order books to prove it. Hey, everybody, thanks for watching. Make sure to like and subscribe if you like this video. And now I'm going to leave you with a bunch of Tesla-powered Porsche burnouts.