A decade ago, battery-electric vehicles were just starting to grow in popularity and the conversion of gas cars to electric vehicles was in its infancy. Today, both industries are becoming more robust with every passing year.
Richard Morgan, CEO of Electric Classic Cars, has been a part of the conversion movement since its early days. “We’ve been converting classic cars now for 10 years… There weren’t too many companies globally converting classic cars back then,” he told Newsweek. In the last decade, Electric Classic Cars has converted over 100 models to run on electrons.
Over the years, a host of innovations have changed the range capabilities, power allocation and weight of BEVs. Those changes have made their way over to the conversion world.
The types of conversions Morgan and his team have executed are “a real smorgasbord.”
He said: “When we started way back in 2015, the first car I converted was a VW Beetle, a very common car not exactly known for its performance… I thought the majority of the market would be that kind of car, a car that wasn’t renowned for anything performance-wise, had fairly unreliable drivetrain and could be vastly improved with converting it to electric. But, I was wrong.”
The third car Electric Classic Cars converted was a Ferrari 308. The 308 was the Italian automaker’s successor to the Dino, featured a mid-mounted V8 engine and was manufactured from 1975 to 1985. It’s perhaps best known as the vehicle driven by Thomas Magnum (Tom Selleck) in the Magnum, P.I. television show.
Clients continue to want their Ferraris converted. “In the last 12 months, we’ve done three Ferrari Testarossas,” Morgan divulged.
Early Land Rovers and “small, little bubble cars like BMWs” frequently make their way to the company’s garage. “We’ve converted pretty much everything there is out there in classic car land, from the tiniest little bubble car up to the largest four by four,” he said.
The model they convert the most often is the Land Rover Defender, a model not known for its powertrain. “The engine was pretty much the weakest link in that vehicle. If you want to bring a Land Rover Defender into the 21st Century, one of the first things you would do is get rid of the old tractor diesel engine and replace it with some modern drivetrain,” Morgan said.
Morgan’s customers have two choices: wild or mild. Morgan explained that the “mild” option installs a fairly baseline power delivery system into the model while “wild” takes a model to a whole new level.
Every Electric Classic Car build is customized for a customer’s needs. Different drivetrains and powertrains are chosen to match the vehicle and customer expectations.
“The sort of drivetrain we’ll use in something like a little classic Mini, for instance, is not going to be the same type of drivetrain that we’ll use in a big four-by-four, like Land Rover. And the same goes for the battery packs. We wouldn’t use the same kind of battery modules in all the vehicles. The types and versions of battery modules [used], just like with the drivetrain, completely depends upon the available space and weight. We have a nice shopping list of different drivetrains and batteries that we can call on to fit into the vehicle to meet the [range and power] expectations of the customer,” Morgan said.
He shared: “I don’t know anybody that’s converted a classic car to electric because of government incentives or reasons. The main reason I see is because they want to enjoy the classic car with modern day vehicle reliability and practicality…. They can see the benefits of having that beautiful, very iconic classic car, but with the reliability of a modern vehicle.”
Electric Classic Cars does not do body swaps, where a mechanic chops up a donor car and fits its undercarriage and components to the body of another vehicle. Instead, they build bespoke conversion solutions that can be attached to the existing vehicle in place of its internal combustion engine powertrain system.
There are benefits to this, Morgan says, not the least of which is that doing conversions this way means less cutting and welding. “We do that because we’re very passionate about classic cars. We don’t want to change the bodywork of something that was built 50, 60, 70 years ago. We’re quite passionate about maintaining the heritage of that body shell.”
Another reason, Morgan explained, is that those kinds of body swaps are illegal in Europe. “You can’t cut one car and another car and weld them together. That’s something that we just see in the U.S.”
Electric Classic Cars sells kits to conversion shops across the world, an expansion of its U.K.-based business.
“We have bolt-in conversion kits for Minis, Porsche 911s, Porsche 912s, Land Rovers, VW Beetles, the common cars that we convert. We already have a very well-evolved and defined bolting kit that includes the battery packs, the motor, the high-voltage cabling and the low-voltage cabling,” Morgan said.
But, 50 percent of Electric Classic Cars’ business is vehicles they haven’t done before. “We still get the oddball cars that we’ve not had through the workshop before. So, there we have to fall on our list of parts that we use and create a custom conversion solution for those vehicles, and at the same time make a strategic decision as to whether or not we’re going to treat that initial car as a development springboard to build a repeatable conversion kit upon,” he said.
How much does converting a classic car to an electric vehicle cost? It’s not cheap. “I’ll give you a real wide, bracketed cost,” Morgan said. “If you are talking about something really small, like a city or bubble car or a Mini or something like that, you’re talking about $35,000 up to probably $135,000 [on] average… But, we’ve had vehicles where the budget has been over $200,000, over $250,000, and we’ve done vehicles cheaper than $35,000.”
Electric Classic Car’s clientele is illustrious. “We’ve done quite a few Hollywood actors’ [vehicles], but they value their privacy. Which ones can I say? One that comes to mind is Dev Patel [from Slumdog Millionaire, among other films]. He has a beautiful dark blue Fiat 500 that we converted for him. I think he calls it Peanut,” Morgan said.
“We’ve done royals’ [vehicles] but unfortunately, I can’t mention details… everything from royal families to Hollywood actors to everyday people, from teachers to engineers,” he continued. “It’s quite a wide demographic of the type of people that we have as clients.”
While clients may enjoy the cars today, resale might be on the mind. About two dozen battery-electric vehicle conversions have been sold publicly over the last five years, a Hagerty spokesperson told Newsweek. Those models (the most common being versions of the VW Beetle, Porsche 914 and Porsche 911) have had a 58-percent sell-through rate with an average high bid of $28,700.
In May 2022, Hagerty conducted a survey that found that 25 percent of automotive enthusiasts approved of classic cars being partially or fully converted to electric drivetrains (versus 42 percent that disapproved).
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