Vintage Voltage TV show

This is a De Lorean they converted:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfPelgfEjpo

With the De Lorean they might have increased the worth as production quality was poor and they often had faults.

Take your point that this may devalue them on the open market yet they enable through more power and strengthening shocks and brakes a more powerful and often better handling car.

Of course more power = more power needed through electricity generation.

Weight often goes up and batteries reduce boot space.

On performance alone they beat conventional cars.

On the weight issue think the Mini was just 50kgs heavier.

It seems combustion engines are heavier than BEV engines so the batteries add weight they often not as much as we might think.

It depends on what range you want. As Pacifico said the current Mini is 350kgm heavier even with a 32 kWh battery (which has a range of 100 miles). If it had a more practical range of 300 miles it would need at least an 80kWh battery which is a LOT heavier. The 1.5 litre Mini petrol engine is about 120kgms which is not that much more than an electric motor and its ancillaries.

But I was thinking more about the conversion of the old (original) Mini which weighed about 600kgms (!). Adding a 500 kgm battery to that roughly doubles the weight. Of course the conversions on this program don't put reasonable range batteries in their cars because they simply wouldn't fit. But I repeat, putting a powerful electric motor in a classic mini is very dangerous because they don't have modern stability controls.

Another factor that these cowboys don't seem to even think about is that Li-ion batteries need cooling. The electric motor may not get very hot but the batteries do. And when Li-ion batteries get hot they're bloody dangerous. In a properly designed electric car the batteries are laid out along the floor pan (low down to help stability) and are cooled by the A/C unit (usually). But these cowboys stick batteries wherever they'll fit with no cooling - even in the boot. And one thing to bear in mind about Li-ion batteries is that when you get "thermal runaway" you probably won't have time to stop and get out. 

And I read more in the papers about EVs being very hard to insure because insurers are becoming more aware of the costs of repairing them. One man with a Mini electric said his insurance had gone up from £450 to £800 in a year. I very much doubt if anyone would even get a quote for one of these conversions. 

This is from their Youtube clip:


This car is the star of Series 2 of the TV show Vintage Voltage and the worlds first Tesla powered classic Mini. A Classic Mini with a 300hp Tesla drive unit from the front of a Tesla Model S converted by my mate Moggy and is team at Electric Classic Cars. Amazingly the EV conversion has only added about 40kg to the standard cars weight, bringing this car in at 700kg. That means staggering performance, incredible handling and torque steer like nothing I've experienced before !

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKWe1R1bWOM&t=386s

Sorry but I think that's the most puke-worthy video I've ever seen. Who is that arsehole doing the interviewing? And what capacity is the battery? 20 kWh I'd guess, if that. And having difficulty breaking 0-60 in 6 seconds nowadays is NOT fast - especially with 300 bhp and less than 1 metric tonne. The problem is that acceleration times nowadays depend mainly on getting the power down on the road - and that demands good traction (i.e. a bit of weight), good traction control and big wheels. Also 4 wheel drive. Putting 300 bhp in a Mini is a waste of time because the "traction control" - which is not a modern ESP system - simply cuts the power when the wheels spin. That's why it's slow. 

This guy has just spent a vast amount of money (£50 grand or more I'd say) producing a car that's slow and dangerous - and completely impractical. It's also uninsurable and worth nothing on the s/h market. It looks like it was just a standard 998 Mini Cooper when new, which were quite slow (55bhp). What he should have done is - if he wanted an appreciating asset and a fun car to drive - is uprate it to the 1275S Cooper S model. This is easy to do and quite cheap. I had one and they're great fun.

Petrol cars are not going away in the next 30 years. What's going away is battery powered electric cars. They just don't work.    

No, you're way out, for many reasons but I'm sure many of our politicians would agree with you. One of the problems - and there are hundreds - with moving all cars over to battery powered electric is that our National Grid would have to be expanded in capacity by about 3 times (minimum). It already can't handle the tiny number of BEVs we have at the moment. The cost of the expansion of the National Grid would be monumental and it would take decades - even if it were possible. Basically it will never happen.

There's also the problem that battery powered are not practical for most purposes. Most people aren't able to install a charger but the number of public charging points would need to be huge because of the length of time it takes to charge the cars. The govt thinks that the private sector will build them but they won't - for the simple reason that they can't make any money from them. They're very expensive to install and take a lot of land (again because of the length of time it takes to charge).

And don't imagine that charging times will go down significantly. It's physically not possible. To deliver the energy that can be put in a petrol tank in a couple of minutes would require an electric cable at least 10 inches in diameter and a charger of 3000kW - both of which are impossible.

I could go on - like we need oil because there are so many byproducts from the refining of oil that we can't manufacture in other ways (like fertiliser) - but it would take too long. We'll still be using oil in the next century and beyond. But I very much doubt that we'll be driving BEVs. I think the dangers of their batteries will rapidly lead to their being banned.