You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
All you’ll need is thousands of dollars and some elbow grease.
When Adam Roe hits the accelerator and sends his vintage Land Rover flying past a Porsche, he likes to imagine what the other driver must be thinking.
While Roe’s ride looks the part of a restored Land Rover Series II, an off-roading, unbreakable icon from the late 1950s, the secret is what’s under the skin. Whereas the original bruiser produced about 45 total horsepower, Roe says, the “restomod” created by his company, ZeroLabs, is a fully electric vehicle with 600 horses — more than enough to catch a sports car by surprise.
Being a classic car enthusiast doesn’t have to mean burning fossil fuels anymore. ZeroLabs is part of a small but growing community of startup companies and DIYers who are transforming some of the most beloved vehicles of automotive history into zero-emissions EVs. The next time you see a beautifully restored boxy Chevy Blazer rolling down the highway, it might just be battery-powered.
Patrick Mackey has been turning vintage Mazda Miatas into electric cars for more than a decade. Back in the 2000s, he wanted a fun but fully electric car like the original Tesla Roadster, but couldn’t afford what Elon Musk was asking. When he looked around at the kind of cars the DIY-inclined were hacking into EVs, he thought about small rides like the Toyota Yaris and Honda De La Soul. But it was the classic Miata — derided by muscle-heads as too wimpy, but beloved by car enthusiasts who recognize its compact greatness — that became the obvious choice.
“The Miatas have a great reputation for handling,” Mackey says. “They sold a ton of ‘em, so there’s a lot of ‘em out there and you can get one for a reasonable price.” Despite its small stature, the Miata was a sturdy car, with thick frame rails that are strong enough to hold a hefty EV battery back. (Mazda itself won’t be selling you an electric Miata until 2026, by the way.)
Initially, Mackey and his colleagues considered building their own EV conversions and selling them directly to people, like ZeroLabs does, or making kits to sell that would contain all the parts a person would need to turn a gas-powered Miata into an electric one. But the steel parts weighed a ton and wouldn’t fit inside one another for shipping, rendering the idea impractical.
Instead, Mackey’s EV Miata website offers all the plans and fabrication documents a home mechanic would need to take on the job. It’s up to the builder to source the off-the-shelf electrical components to do the job, or, perhaps, to salvage them from a wrecked EV as many DIYers do now, he says.
Courtesy of EV-Miata.com
A surprising amount of the original Miata parts can survive the transformation. “You would keep the transmission and everything behind it, so that part of the powertrain you keep. You’d replace the motor with an adapter plate to connect the motor up to it. Then there’s the battery pack and the controller and all those E components come into play. But in that case, the majority of the car is there. If you are going racing, or you’re looking for something with higher performance, you could remove the transmission and then do a direct drive and have two or three motors that are driving the rear wheels.” Or, he says, some people are doing what’s called a stack replacement. They get a Nissan Leaf’s entire subframe, containing the axles and transmission and motors, and swap that into their EV conversion so it’s running on all Leaf parts.
Car restoration has always been a money pit of a hobby. EV conversion is no different — you do it for love, not because it’s cheaper than just buying an electric car. Mackey says the EV Miata project probably costs about $22,000 now, not counting the cost of buying an old Mazda nor the sweat equity required to build it.
Nevertheless, plenty of people with the proper mechanical chops take on the challenge. At Caltech, where I work (and where lots of people are electrical engineers), there’s a vintage Porsche often plugged in next to me that was clearly hacked into an electric. With enough cash, you could buy a kit to convert just about any classic car into an EV.
And the DIY EV is just one end of the spectrum. On the far side lies fully realized conversions like those by ZeroLabs, which specializes in not just electrifying, but modernizing Ford Broncos and other beloved SUVs of yore.
Courtesy of ZeroLabs.
“A restoration is to say, hey, we’re going to put this back to the original condition exactly as it would’ve been, which means no Bluetooth, no three-point seat belts. You got to use radial tires, you got to put on whitewalls. You got to use period-correct paint and AM radio and [an] ashtray. That’s a restoration. That’s not what we’re doing.”
Roe was inspired by a backcountry snowboarding trip when the engine on his old Bronco cut out, a problem that plagued the old SUVs. As it coasted silently, he fell in love with the idea of a classic car without all the noise. “You could hear the winds, you could hear the tires, you’re in your classic, but you’re also kind of with nature versus being hidden by this loud rumbly loud noise engine with your stereo,” he says.
In place of their original bare-bones interiors, ZeroLab’s reimagined EV trucks and SUVs have all the tech features of a modern vehicle. “We looked at everything that needs to be done for a modern car: How do we think about steering, how do we think about brakes, communication, upgradeability, and charging rates? All of that has changed, and so simply electrifying that car isn't really enough.”
Their creations aren’t for the faint of wallet. The fully realized ZeroLabs first-generation Bronco starts at nearly $300,000. But it seems there are plenty of wealthy buyers looking for a boxy, retro, or just plain eccentric electric car that doesn’t look anything like the production EVs now rolling off the assembly line. Roe exudes optimism that EV restomods will have their Tesla moment within the next couple of years — and the EVs that are old on the outside and new on the inside will be the next big thing.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.