‘Tesla Hacker’ building a 1,000hp electric car using Tesla drivetrain and Chevy Volt batteries

When Jason Hughes, best known as the ‘Tesla Hacker’ who first spotted the upcoming 100 kWh battery pack in the Model S’ OS, retrofitted a classic Tesla Model S P85 with an entire Autopilot hardware suite, something Tesla itself refuses to do because of the cost and complexity, we thought we just witnessed the apogee of his ‘Tesla hardware hacking’ experiments, but we were so very wrong.

We learned a little more about Hughes’ latest project this week and it could prove even more impressive technically speaking than his Autopilot retrofit, and certainly more spectacular.

Earlier this week, Hughes posted an image teasing the project on his Twitter account and a video to his Youtube channel yesterday.

From the images and the few hints he dropped, we got a good idea of what he is up to, but we still reached out for more details and we were not disappointed.

Jason, aka wk057, is building a 1,000hp all-electric vehicle using a custom Tesla powertrain combined with 2 Chevy Volt battery packs.

He didn’t want to confirm in what body he will be installing this beast of an electric powertrain, but if his “3000EV” hint is of any indication, our money is on a classic Mitsubishi 3000GT.

Here’s the setup Hughes hopes to deliver.

He got his hands on two Tesla performance drive units. Even Tesla’s top performance model, the Model S P90D Ludicrous, only has one of these units – in the back. The other motor is a smaller less powerful unit in the front.

Hughes will instead use two performance drive units, one in the front and one in the back. He should be able to get about 500 HP from each for short periods of times. He made a custom control board in order to control the 2 motors.

Here’s his first test:

Very impressive.

In order to power this crazy drivetrain, Jason will be using 2 Chevy Volt battery packs supported by 6 Tesla battery modules. He estimates that the Volt packs can do close to 20C discharge without issue, which is why he is using them and not only the Tesla modules. He expects to get 850 kW peak output from the custom pack.

In term of energy capacity, The Volt packs are 16 kWh each and a Tesla module is about 5 kWh for a total of around 62 kWh. Hughes expects the range to be around 120-150 miles, which is not bad for what will essentially be a drag racing monster.

It will be interesting see how he manages to put all this together into a car. We will be following the project, but if you want more updates, I suggest following Jason on Twitter and Youtube.