Getty Images | Orich Lawson
Earth Day is April 22, and its usual message – take care of our planet – is made more urgent by the challenges highlighted in the IPCC’s latest report. This year, Ars is looking at the technologies we typically cover, from cars to chip manufacturing, and finding out how we can make them more sustainable and minimize their impact on the climate.
Back in the 1990s, the term “restomod” began to gain traction. As muscle car enthusiasts looked for ways to improve the performance and reliability of older machines, cottage industries of adapting new powertrains and chassis components quickly began to emerge. You’d be hard-pressed to find an unmodified late-’60s Mustang or Camaro on the road today—whether it’s computer-controlled fuel injection, updated brakes and suspension, or even a modern V8 engine.
To some, this may be blasphemous. For others, it’s just keeping up with the times.
Over the past decade or so, a similar modding trend has begun to emerge in electric vehicle technology, although the early focus was not on melting tires, but on pragmatism and engineering curiosity.
“I was involved in tuning back in 2009, and it was a weird time because it was after the recession,” said Michael Bream of EV West, an electric car tuning shop in San Marcos, California. “I read an article about the Roadster that Tesla is developing, and as a computer engineer and avid enthusiast, I’m a bit obsessed with the technology involved. I want to see what’s possible with electric performance.”
“But when I did the research, I found myself a little dissuaded,” Bream told Ars. “I would call these stores that work with tech, and they want to talk about horsepower, continuous work and stuff like that, but they just want to talk about how much money you can save by sticking with OPEC. At the end of the day, no one really worries about five or six dollars a gallon gasoline.”
Electric vehicle development was still subject to rounding errors in the budgets of most major automakers at the time, and Bream also faced enormous difficulty finding aftermarket parts, but he said that in the years since, The situation has changed significantly.
“It’s not just the drivetrain and the battery available stuff, there’s a lot of other stuff that the early builders had to live with. There weren’t well-established systems to add power brakes, for example,” Bream said. “The solution is to put in a vacuum pump to mimic the way it works with an internal combustion engine, and we also use a belt-driven hydraulic pump for steering assist. But now, thanks to cars like the Nissan Leaf, the Chevy Bolt, and the Tesla EVs in production, purpose-built solutions [like electrically driven hydraulic pumps] Developed in OE [original equipment] grade. This helps improve the EV experience. It also brings higher quality parts at a lower cost, which in turn brings more affordability to the EV retrofit market. “
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Enlarge / Ford builds the F-100 Eluminator to show off its new Mustang Mach-E-derived electric crate motor.
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OEMs have taken notice, too. At last year’s Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) show — the big annual conference for aftermarket performance suppliers in Las Vegas — Ford showed off the F-100 Eluminator concept, a way to capitalize on the automaker’s momentum One-off custom products for assembly components. The Mustang Mach-E GT in the vintage F-series pickup is a production EV. It’s the latest in a line of performance-focused EVs from the automaker, which includes the all-electric Mustang Cobra Jet 1400 race car and Mach-E 1400 drift car prototype.
“I think this is just the beginning,” said Mark Wilson, Ford’s personalization business operations manager. “If you look at the life cycle of ICE [internal combustion engine] In the long run, there seems to be an end date – they will be phased out. When that happens, it’s only a matter of time before existing ICE products will be obsolete, so to speak. “
“It’s going to be even more important for products where the engine isn’t really the core focus of the vehicle,” Wilson said. The 1978 F-100 is a good example — the truck itself is cool, but the inline-six that originally powered it The cylinder engine is less important. So, in this case, replacing the powertrain may not do less damage to the value, nostalgia and overall appeal of the vehicle.”
The Eluminator concept is more than lip service—the two electric traction motors that drive the F-100’s front and rear wheels (total system output of 480 horsepower and 634 pound-feet of torque) are now available for public purchase through Ford Performance.
