Ford may be losing $Billions yet converting cars of any age gets more affordable every day. Legacy EV paves the way! And both can be converted back to original if ever needed.
This is not something you see every day. Richard Rawlings rescued a bunch of Ferrari Testarossa cars from the clutches of a film crew after they wrapped on Mark Wahlberg’s movie “Infinite”. Movie cars endure hard times from stunt drivers… like me… and they usually get modified in ways that render them illegal for road use. So they usually get crushed by the producers at the end of the film. Not these ones. Rawlings has re-invented one of these bad boys with an all electric motor to create the Teslarossa and in person it looks pretty sweet. Inside it’s got a kind of yoke steering wheel and Knightrider vibe. Hopefully he’ll remember to bolt down the seats otherwise the first drive could result in the driver falling on the floor.
The centre driving position so Mclaren F1 and ideal for subjugating your comrades on a weekend cruise along the Pacific Highway. But my eyes were really drawn to the 1928 Ford Model A that received some special attention from one of the world’s leading EV conversion businesses: Fellten. My first thought on what to do with people who rip heritage combustion motors out of vintage cars was to tie them to the bumper of one and drive until I ran out of gas. However.. Having driven a converted Ferrari 328 and seen that it drove pretty well… and seen that it’s possible to retrofit the motor back to combustion… I reckoned it better to see a car being used than rotting in a garage or left to burn in the desert. Fellten are the dons at respecting the past and fitting reversible engineering components and that’s what this Model A project was all about.
The car barely resembles its original self anyway, having been lowered and stretched and cut and shut and blasted and filled and painted. But the underlying technology remains – it still has leaf spring suspension, which remains an awesome way to control a chassis, and it has direct mechanical steering as opposed to the Playstation BS fluffy hands we get in modern cars. This Model A will be a blast to drive and has been fettled in a way that only American customisers can do – with some help from their British friends at Fellten from Bristol. Their EV systems look so simple that you could almost imagine fitting them yourself, which is a sign of how much work has gone into the design. Electrifying ain’t simple – and it has to be done perfectly or not at all. At the end of the day it’s down to user preference – do you think it will better as a silent but speedy EV, or with the throbbing V8 in its belly ??
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