Trying hard to not make this political

[71ProjectJunk]

I've been around the smell of gasoline my entire life. But, (get your stones ready) I have a crazy idea that my next project could be a 7172 with a Ford electric crate. Supposedly they are going to also offer controllers entire. In the future also.  I would only even think about doing this on car with no motor. Just a hairbrained idea. 

Stones away. 

I drive classic cars because I like the experience of driving something that does not drive itself and is not an appliance, I like the smells, the sounds, and the memories it brings back. I personally would never convert a classic car into an electric car. To me it would take so much away from the experience of driving the car, that I might as well just be driving a new car. I can see the Coyote swaps and the 6 speed swaps, but converting the car to electric for me would be a deal breaker. I know that some electric cars are stupid fast, but honestly, without the sound, vibration, smells, the going sideways, the banging of gears as you try to maintain control, you heart beating faster as you don't know if you will be able to keep this thing going straight, the banshee scream of the engine and exhaust going up and down as the gears get banged in with extreme prejudice, the vibrations of the car, engine and exhaust, and best of all the look of absolute horror on your passengers face as a small part of his life flashes in front of him every time you put another gear in...  :biggrin:   This experience cannot be reproduced on any modern electric vehicle. 

 

[kevken1959]

                          I don't think that we are going to go all electric anytime soon, it will be a good long time before we get there, if we ever do. The infrastructure is not there, the electric grid as it stands could not EVER support every vehicle in the road being electric, and to this day, you still have issues with range, and charging times, that they may, or may not resolve. Right now, I can tell you for a fact, that there is a LOT of change going on in the electric supply chain, they are trying to kill coal/natural gas generation and replace it with solar/wind. There is a lot if underhanded stuff being done by the feds to subsidize the solar/wind plants to the point that the coal/natural gas plants can't compete and thus have to close. We just had a coal plant close in my area. I have received letters from my electric cooperative to expect more blackouts and higher prices in the coming years as all this change happens. They explained how the feds are killing the coal and natural gas plants, by subsidizing the solar and wind plants. they also explained that this is NOT a good thing as solar and wind generation is not as reliable as the old methods. I live in Texas, and we just sent through the "snowpocalypse" in February, most of the states electric grid went down for days. One of the major contributing factors was wind and solar, the wind turbines froze, and there was little to no sunlight for days when this happened so the electric plants were not producing much, there were issues with the traditional generation forms too, but even if they had no issues, the collapse of the renewables meant that the grid was going to go down. Anyways, the grid for the next 10-20 years will probably be less reliable and will not have much increased capacity because of all the change of going from fossil fuels to renewables. I can't remember what the cooperative was saying about how much electric generation/capacity you needed with renewables to be able to get rid of fossil fuels, but it was a lot more, as it is so unreliable compared to fossil fuels. 

                      If they try to force manufacturers to only make electric cars in like 10 years, it will backfire big time. There will be major issue with there not being enough electric generation to feed the needs, you will end up with blackouts anytime there are increased energy needs, and it will not be a good thing. Now, imagine a state wide blackout for days, like we had here in Texas, and your cars batteries are empty or go empty... And you can't pull out your gasoline generator to charge it, as there is no gasoline, LOL. 

                     As for gasoline cars becoming illegal to drive, or gasoline getting so expensive that you cannot afford to, I don't know. Now, we need to be aware that California already has a law that all new cars sold in the state by 2035 have to be zero emissions vehicles... From there, to the point where they make it impossible for you to drive you gas car may not be far behind. In Europe there are already cities that have said that no ICE (internal combustion engines) can drive on their streets by 2030 or so. This may not be far behind here. So, if you live in a city that puts a no ICE car can be driven in this city, I guess you have a problem. 

                     My prediction is that if you live in a liberal state, they will eventually make it impossible for you to drive your classic car, except at a race track or something of the sort. If you live in a conservative state, you will be able to drive your ICE car till the day you die, but it may become expensive because of the cost of gasoline. For now values of classic cars will keep going up, if at some point it becomes impossible to drive them in certain states, then they will start coming down, if this never happens, even if gas becomes very expensive, the values will keep going up. 

Thanks 71ProjectJunk. Those words are balanced and encouraging.

 

[kevken1959]

I drive classic cars because I like the experience of driving something that does not drive itself and is not an appliance, I like the smells, the sounds, and the memories it brings back. I personally would never convert a classic car into an electric car. To me it would take so much away from the experience of driving the car, that I might as well just be driving a new car. I can see the Coyote swaps and the 6 speed swaps, but converting the car to electric for me would be a deal breaker. I know that some electric cars are stupid fast, but honestly, without the sound, vibration, smells, the going sideways, the banging of gears as you try to maintain control, you heart beating faster as you don't know if you will be able to keep this thing going straight, the banshee scream of the engine and exhaust going up and down as the gears get banged in with extreme prejudice, the vibrations of the car, engine and exhaust, and best of all the look of absolute horror on your passengers face as a small part of his life flashes in front of him every time you put another gear in...  :biggrin:   This experience cannot be reproduced on any modern electric vehicle. 

Very well said my friend. I needed to hear that! Kevin.

 

[Kilgon]

That stuff is already happening in the modern cars. There are 'features' that make the car sound more muscular or sporty depending on your performance setting. The sound is played thru your speakers for you to hear.

In an electric car, I want it to sound like George Jetson's flying car as I drive past!

You mean like this?

 

[71ProjectJunk]

Here is a video of what it's like to drive a classic car on a racetrack, you will NEVER experience this on an electric appliance, enjoy:

 

[Galucha]

I've had a chance to drive my Tesla now for about 3 years, and I can definitely get behind the sentiment of them not being as "fun" as a lot of gas powered cars. And I don't think that fun factor is something that's really ever gonna be replicated in an EV. However, as a commuter car and a general daily driver, it has been fantastic, and I don't think I could go back to a normal gas commuter car for that purpose.

The reality is that most people on the road don't really care about what kind of fuel their car runs on, and as the technology for EVs keeps going at the rate it's going, EVs are only going to get cheaper and more practical, providing a better value proposition to consumers. 

I do think that the big players in the energy industry have been behind the curve in terms of how much EV adoption will change the industry. It really hasn't been until the last year or two that we've started to see widespread capital investment into charging infrastructure from utilities. Even then, there is a lot of uncertainty into how quickly consumers will adopt it, which means nobody really knows how much additional capacity will need to be added over the next 5-10-20 years to meet demand. I will say that pretty much all utilities are in support of widespread EV adoption and their long-term load forecasts take into account varying levels of it. There are some serious challenges to overcome from a utility perspective, but I think the demand is there.

 

[MikeGriese]

Drive a Tesla roadster and get back to me. 

 

[detritusmaximus]

It seems the crux of it is this...even in this thread, old cars/classic cars have a certain character that has an appeal and electric cars don't have it. But as a couple of posters have said or hinted at, modern cars generally don't have it either. Most people do think of their cars as just another appliance and have no interest in the romance of the car that was a hallmark of our culture for about forty years. Even then, I'd say most people still didn't really care about a lot of it, otherwise their wouldn't have been so many weak, beige four door automatics sold over the years. For the large majority, it's just another room, one that moves and they don't care how. 

Aside from the sound and smell, I suspect an old car with an electric conversion running thru a 4 speed with stock type suspension and rear axle will act about the same as a gas powered car with an equivalent power to weight ratio.

As far as range complaints...an electric conversion with a 250 mile range will probably go further than a Boss 351....refueling/recharging being the difference. And it doesn't need to be $400k.

 

[detritusmaximus]

I was just looking at the specs for the new MachE and the Boss 351. Everything is about the same.

0-60:  5.8 seconds

1/4 mile: 14 seconds

Top Speed:

Boss 351 (according the Car and Driver) 117mph

MachE 130

I always did want to know what the Boss top speed was with a better rear gear. 

 

[71ProjectJunk]

It seems the crux of it is this...even in this thread, old cars/classic cars have a certain character that has an appeal and electric cars don't have it. But as a couple of posters have said or hinted at, modern cars generally don't have it either. Most people do think of their cars as just another appliance and have no interest in the romance of the car that was a hallmark of our culture for about forty years. Even then, I'd say most people still didn't really care about a lot of it, otherwise their wouldn't have been so many weak, beige four door automatics sold over the years. For the large majority, it's just another room, one that moves and they don't care how. 

Aside from the sound and smell, I suspect an old car with an electric conversion running thru a 4 speed with stock type suspension and rear axle will act about the same as a gas powered car with an equivalent power to weight ratio.

As far as range complaints...an electric conversion with a 250 mile range will probably go further than a Boss 351....refueling/recharging being the difference. And it doesn't need to be $400k.

The electric motors produce a ton of torque at very low RPM's, I am not sure of how well an old toploader transmission or any modern manual transmission will do with that. Even the rear ends and driveshafts may have a hard time with it. Now, one of the things that make the electric cars so fast is that they are mostly AWD vehicles, at least all the fast ones that I am aware of are. These things come out of the hole like a Saturn 5 rocket. If you were to just put power to the back wheels, you would have a very hard time making one of these things stick. It would surely make it a handful and probably as fun as a big block car on skinny bias plies, without the sound or smells  :biggrin:

 

[71ProjectJunk]

                 The one thing that bothers me about all the electric cars is the hand of big brother on the scale. I am fine with people buying as many electric cars as they want, but this idea that the government is going to literally make you to buy them, by either force or coercion, is just wrong to me. If people one day wake up and decide that all they want is electric cars, then great, we all get to buy what we want, but forcing this down our throats just seems so wrong, and it always bring unintended consequences. Let the electric car compete on an even platform with the ICE car, and let them win over the hearts and minds of the consumer. Let it be a gradual change as people change their tastes in vehicles. This approach would not bring in most of the unintended consequences as it would happen gradually, and the free market will respond to what people want. But all this forcing of this new technology down everyone's throats, when there are so many issues still with the tech and the infrastructure that are unresolved, will bring consequences with it.

              Just go back to the late 60's and the clean air act, CAFE standards, and then the car safety rules. They forced down the throats of the car manufacturers these new emissions, CAFE, and safety rules in one shot. The technology did not exits at the time to get emissions levels where the government wanted in the short time frame that wanted, so a lot of money and development time, needed to go into making converters and other emission systems, instead of making better cars. Then they wanted better fuel economy and safety at the same time, for safety you needed to increase weight, and for fuel economy that was a bad thing. Then you got the oil embargo, in the middle of it all, and the USA car industry was never the same again. The reliability issues with the new emissions and CAFE stuff that was put on cars, killed the credibility of the USA auto industry so bad, that in my opinion they have never recovered. The little imported Toyotas, Hondas, etc... that started flooding the market, did not have to have almost any of the early emission stuff, and they could certainly meet CAFE standards. So, these little econoboxes, were utterly reliable and frugal, at a time when the USA built cars were just a mess of emissions and CAFE strangled, gutless, unreliable messes... Anyone remember the Chrysler "lean burn system"? What an utter POS. The feds put their hands on the scale, and literally killed the auto industry. Chrysler almost went under, AMC went under, and GM and Ford were also close to going under. GM used to have over 50% market share, and now they are down to about 15%. In fact GM was so dominant that there were talks of breaking them up like AT&T. GM did a lot of things in the 60's to actually slow down their market share growth, they were genuinely afraid of being broken up, not 10 years after all theses emission, CAFE and safety standards, they were struggling as a car company.

       The clean burning, more fuel efficient, and safer cars would have come without the government having to force the car makers, and killing the USA car industry in short order. All would have happened, it just would have been slower and would not have caused all of the unintended consequences we saw. Same thing would probably have happened with the electric cars, people would eventually warm up to them, and as they did the infrastructure would slowly grow at a pace that makes sense without a bunch of consequences.

 

[detritusmaximus]

Pretty common for the home grown conversions to use an actual manual transmission. It may be because that are trying to compensate for the lower power of the motors and batteries used for these 'budget' builds. I haven't heard of too many home conversions having insane power levels.

All that black spaghetti under the hoods of mid to late 70s American cars was a nightmare. Under the hood, my 08 GT looks as complicated as my 74 Opel Manta by comparison. The chassis wiring and the smart junction box more than make up for it, though.

I'm not a fan of things like California decreeing X percentage have to be electric. But I also remember the talk of how bad the smog in LA was in the 70's, ten years after CA started the emissions ball rolling. The pics from the 60s were horrendous. Other major cities were pretty bad. Now, after all these years, the air is much better, but even with the advances in emissions by the early 90s, there were so many more cars and big trucks on the road that the improvements were at potentially at risk.

I think it was in the early 50s that London got sacked in with an inversion that trapped all the smog at ground level. A good amount of 'London Fog' (the namesake for the overcoat company) is actually smog from all the coal they burned over the centuries. I forget how many people died during that particular 'fog'. Now China is dealing with the exact same thing.

I don't think government interference is needed at this point. Big Business more than Big Brother. GM and the other car companies are seeing the future of reduced manufacturing and service costs of EVs compared to continuing to engineer the ICE. The cost keeps coming down and no CARB or EPA to deal with. Even battery replacement will be less of a headache as there arepossible plans for 'trade in' so the old battery can be repurposed for less demanding uses, like house batteries.

One great benefit of electric cars is that we get that much closer to the flying cars we were promised 60 years ago!

 

[detritusmaximus]

By the way, just to be clear, virtually everything I've said is just my opinion based on observation, no real expertise is to be inferred or implied.

The rest I am paid to say.

 

[71ProjectJunk]

I am very well aware of what was happening in the LA area of California in the 1960's and 1970's, and they certainly needed to do something about it and quick, and establishing emissions standards for that state was fine, and would have resolved the issue there. The problem is 95% of the rest of the country did not have any issues, or issues even close to that, yet everyone was affected. The problem is not what the feds did, but how they did it, and at the speed they wanted this done. I have read automotive journalists say that in the mid to late 70's and early 80's American cars were so badly hindered and choked by emissions that they would sometimes get test cars that would barely run without them bucking and stalling as they were running so lean. 

I am sure that cars today, even without any government intervention, would still be as clean as they currently are because the public ultimately demanded clean cars. 

 

[72MustangSprint]

As a owner of both , Tesla Model 3 performance and classic cars 4 Mustangs and  Turbo Trans Am , they are great in there own ways. EV is a great daily driver and classics have there place too. You will still be able to drive classics but it will cost more. They are going to make it expensive to drive ICE cars as daily drivers. My Tesla will blow away most gas cars 0-60 (3.1 sec) and is a blast to drive. Don’t even mention the Model S plaid , 0-60 under 2 sec and 8.99 to 9.2 quarter mile. Oh and I charge mostly at home and it costs about a $100 a month to drive . 

 

[MikeGriese]

I'm not convinced that auto companies (at least American companies) would have eventually "done the right thing" in terms of emissions, fuel economy, and safety without government coercion.  The American buying public really doesn't care about those things as decision factors when it comes to buying a vehicle.  If they did, there wouldn't be nearly as many ginormous pickups and SUVs on the road today.  I have to believe a key motivator in that is that this class of vehicle didn't have to meet the same corporate average fuel economy or safety requirements as cars.  This made trucks and SUVs much more profitable for the companies, which made them much more attractive to advertise. 

If you dig a bit into how global car development happened, you find all kinds of influences from governments.  Some of the influence is direct - safety regulations as an example, others are indirect, such as taxation based on engine displacement, lack of subsidies for fuel companies, wartime economies.  The US never really had that kind of environment until the 60's when folks like Nader started to hold their feet to the fire over safety and the 70's when OPEC made fuel economy a decision factor and California made emissions reduction a thing.  The auto companies were definitely not leaders in those areas, and in fact put up a pretty good fight against it.

 

[71ProjectJunk]

I'm not convinced that auto companies (at least American companies) would have eventually "done the right thing" in terms of emissions, fuel economy, and safety without government coercion.  The American buying public really doesn't care about those things as decision factors when it comes to buying a vehicle.  If they did, there wouldn't be nearly as many ginormous pickups and SUVs on the road today.  I have to believe a key motivator in that is that this class of vehicle didn't have to meet the same corporate average fuel economy or safety requirements as cars.  This made trucks and SUVs much more profitable for the companies, which made them much more attractive to advertise. 

If you dig a bit into how global car development happened, you find all kinds of influences from governments.  Some of the influence is direct - safety regulations as an example, others are indirect, such as taxation based on engine displacement, lack of subsidies for fuel companies, wartime economies.  The US never really had that kind of environment until the 60's when folks like Nader started to hold their feet to the fire over safety and the 70's when OPEC made fuel economy a decision factor and California made emissions reduction a thing.  The auto companies were definitely not leaders in those areas, and in fact put up a pretty good fight against it.

I believe that the American car companies would have had to change, I don't think that we would still be in the 1960's running leaded gas with no emission controls. As we all know the rest of the world changed, and as soon as California put their own emissions controls, the writing was on the wall as California is such a huge market. At the beginning it made sense to have a California emissions car, and a non California emissions car, but eventually it would not make sense to have 2 completely different cars. In reality the issue is not what happened, but how it happened. I think we all agree that emission controls are a good thing, no one wants to live with dirty air and water, but the draconian way in which it was implemented was the issue. EV's, most will agree will be a good thing, as long as we are not generating all the electricity from Coal, and the grid does not collapse, and they figure out what they are going to do with all those toxic batteries when their lives are over. The issue again is with the implementation, they are forcing this on us, with unresolved issues like range and charging times, with a non existent infrastructure, and with a lot of issues with the EV's still to be resolved... 

Remember when alcohol E85 was going to be the answer, until all the unintended consequences started popping up... Everything was going flex fuel all speed ahead, until they figured out that using our food resources for making fuel, was probably not the best idea in the world...

I know people that own EV's, but I have yet to meet one that has only an EV as their only vehicle. Everyone that I know that has an EV, has another vehicle, and there is a reason for that, and we all know what it is. 

 

[MikeGriese]

I don't understand why people say there isn't the infrastructure for EVs.  There are literally billions of electrical outlets around.  Quick chargers aren't as prolific as gas stations (yet), but everyone has an outlet at home they can do the majority of their recharging from.  Most people don't outdrive an EV's range in a day, so for daily driving, recharging isn't a big deal.  Quick chargers are much cheaper and faster to install than a gas station, and can be located pretty much anywhere a car can park.  If most people recharge at night, which is off peak for power generation (more capacity available than demand), the generation infrastructure can keep up as offpeak demand rises.

These arguments are similar to gasoline distribution 110 years ago.  A big difference this time around is that most utility companies have to work with public utility commissions - there is the opportunity for far more public input into solutions than there ever was with oil companies. 

Oh - and for an interesting description about what happened last year in Texas can be found here:

 

[detritusmaximus]

Speaking of water pollution...remember when that river in Ohio caught fire?......

Personally, I'm a big fan of covering every flat top surface with solar panels. Roofs of cars, trucks, busses, buildings, etc. Decentralize the power grid.

 

[rvrtrash]

Not everyone has a 240 volt, 50 amp outlet in their garage. I believe that's the standard for electric chargers, although there are some that are different. When I was building my new shop, I researched it and put in a circuit in case I ever needed it.