00:00 (rock music)
00:02 No one's ever taken an electric motorcycle motor
00:07 and put it in a car before.
00:09 This thing will do 80 no problem all day long.
00:11 But do you really wanna do 80 in this?
00:14 Am I scared driving it?
00:15 Yeah, you just never know what's gonna happen.
00:17 (upbeat music)
00:22 My name's Rich and I run a YouTube channel
00:24 called Rich Rebuilds.
00:25 And this is my 1930s rat rod Ford Model A.
00:29 If I could describe it in three words,
00:31 I'd say it's a work of art.
00:32 I mean, just look at it.
00:34 It's just beautiful.
00:36 It's about 11 feet long and about five feet wide.
00:39 It weighs about, I would say,
00:40 between 12 and like 1300 pounds or so.
00:43 And what powers this thing,
00:45 the heart of it is a electric motor
00:48 out of an electric motorcycle that got wrecked.
00:50 And I figured as much, you know what?
00:52 Why not throw in a rat rod and see what it can do?
00:53 So right here we have the motor itself.
00:56 I had a custom made transmission adapter.
00:59 This is actually battery pack itself.
01:01 It looks like a computer case.
01:02 Everyone gets super confused over it.
01:04 This is actually a transmission out of an old '60s Chevy.
01:08 It's a three-speed manual.
01:09 That's how it gets up to speed so fast.
01:12 Because it's a multi-gear transmission,
01:14 it accelerates pretty quickly for that small baby motor.
01:16 These seats are actually the third row seats
01:19 from an old Dodge Caravan minivan.
01:21 I have the gauge cluster from the motorcycle.
01:24 And right here I have the turn signals.
01:26 I have the high beams, speedometer.
01:29 So everything that I could,
01:30 all the electronics were grafted from the bike
01:33 and it went onto the rat rod.
01:34 It took about six weeks to build from start to finish.
01:39 Woo!
01:42 That's why we have the shield.
01:44 Figuring out how to mate the electric motor
01:48 to the transmission, that was one challenging part.
01:51 And the second challenging part
01:53 was figuring out the accelerator pedal.
01:56 A motorcycle does actually a twist throttle.
01:58 So I had to figure out how to mount it up front
02:00 and turn that twist pedal into the stepping motion
02:03 that you're normally used to in a car.
02:06 I actually attached a manual cable.
02:08 So whenever I step on the foot pedal,
02:10 it turns it that way.
02:11 The first test ride was interesting
02:14 because there were a lot of naysayers saying
02:16 that the small electric motor
02:18 wouldn't be able to actually move the car.
02:19 I was like, is it gonna go anywhere?
02:21 Can it even accelerate?
02:22 And it sure did.
02:25 (laughing)
02:27 The acceleration is surprisingly good.
02:38 What I do is I put it in first gear
02:40 and I just jam the accelerator pedal
02:42 and it actually goes really, really well.
02:44 The transmission allows me to work
02:48 with a much smaller motor.
02:50 So the torque hit is pretty instant.
02:54 (upbeat music)
02:56 Am I scared driving it?
03:04 Yeah, you just never know what's gonna happen.
03:06 Is something gonna fall off?
03:07 Is it gonna blow up?
03:08 I really have no idea.
03:10 Yeah, see there you go, it ran right there.
03:12 So you can see why you could do 80.
03:16 But do you really wanna do 80 in this?
03:18 (laughing)
03:22 My favorite thing about this is definitely
03:24 the look that you get from people
03:25 that expect a big honking engine to be in the front.
03:29 It looks like it's not supposed to move at all.
03:33 There's like nothing up front.
03:35 It just looks like a bunch of
03:36 computer equipment slapped together.
03:37 Why electric hot rod?
03:42 I wanna do it.
03:43 It just had to get done at some point.
03:45 I feel like it really captures the spirit of hot rodding.
03:48 (upbeat music)
03:51 (engine revving)
03:53 (engine revving)
03:56 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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