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A classic 427 Shelby Cobra powered by a Tesla electric motor & Kia Soul EV battery pack

As the electric vehicle market grows, the salvaged electric vehicle market is bound to grow also and that opens up opportunities for hobbyists to use electric motors and battery packs from those salvaged cars to convert more classic vehicles and kit cars to electric propulsion.

We have seen some pretty cool ongoing projects already, like an all-electric 818 kit car with a Tesla drivetrain runing a quarter-mile in 10.1 seconds and conversion of a 1969 VW Karmann Ghia. We now learn of a new project with the body of a classic 427 Shelby Cobra powered by a Tesla motor and a Kia Soul EV battery pack.

A group of friends based in Vancouver, British Columbia, got together for the project with the goal to race the all-electric beast.

They built the chassis themselves and used a mold of the 427 Shelby Cobra for a fiberglass replica of the body.

The goal is to have a light-weight vehicle and the decision to use a Kia Soul EV battery pack played into that since it is the most energy dense battery pack available today with 30 kWh of energy capacity in only a 400-lb pack.

One of the engineers working on the project shared a few pictures on the Tesla Motors Club forum:

They are using the rear-wheel-drive motor of a Tesla Model S P85 to power the vehicle. It’s rated at 310 kW.

The vehicle should be on the tracks later this year and we will be following its performance.

Here’s a short but very informative video explaining their project in details:

Another EV conversion we are pretty excited to see come to life is Jason Hughes’ 1,000hp Mitsubishi 3000GT using a Tesla drivetrain and Chevy Volt batteries. In this case, he is using not one but two Tesla performance motors to get that kind of power.

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Avatar for Fred Lambert Fred Lambert

Fred is the Editor in Chief and Main Writer at Electrek.

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