00:00No one's ever taken an electric motorcycle motor and put it in a car before.
00:05This thing will do 80 no problem all day long.
00:08But do you really want to do 80 in this?
00:10Am I scared driving it? Yeah, you just never know what's going to happen.
00:20My name is Rich and I run a YouTube channel called Rich Rebuilds
00:23and this is my 1930s rat rod Ford Model A.
00:27If I can describe it in three words, I'd say it's a work of art.
00:30I mean, just look at it. It's just beautiful.
00:33It's about 11 feet long and about 5 feet wide.
00:36It weighs about, I would say, between 12 and like 1300 pounds or so.
00:40And what powers this thing, the heart of it is an electric motor
00:45out of an electric motorcycle that got wrecked and I figured as much,
00:48you know what, why not throw in a rat rod and see what it can do.
00:51So right here we have the motor itself.
00:53I had a custom made transmission adapter.
00:56This is actually the battery pack itself.
00:58It looks like a computer case. Everyone gets super confused over it.
01:01This is actually a transmission out of an old 60s Chevy.
01:05It's a three-speed manual. That's how it gets up to speed so fast.
01:08Because it's a multi-gear transmission,
01:11it accelerates pretty quickly for that small baby motor.
01:13These seats are actually the third row seats from an old Dodge Caravan minivan.
01:18I have the gauge cluster from an old Dodge Caravan.
01:21And right here I have the turn signals.
01:24I have the high beams, speedometer.
01:27So everything that I could, all the electronics were grafted from the bike
01:30and it went onto the rat rod.
01:34It took about six weeks to build from start to finish.
01:40That's why we have the shield.
01:44Figuring out how to mate the electric motor to the transmission,
01:47that was one challenging part.
01:49And the second challenging part was figuring out the accelerator pedal.
01:53On a motorcycle, there's actually a twist throttle.
01:55So I had to figure out how to mount it up front
01:57and turn that twist pedal into the stepping motion that you're normally used to in a car.
02:03I actually attached a manual cable.
02:05So whenever I step on the foot pedal, it turns it that way.
02:10The first test ride was interesting because there were a lot of naysayers
02:13saying that the small electric motor wouldn't be able to actually move forward.
02:16I was like, is it going to go anywhere? Can it even accelerate?
02:19And it sure did.
02:32The acceleration is surprisingly good.
02:34What I do is I put it in first gear and I just jam the accelerator pedal
02:37and it actually goes really, really well.
02:40The transmission allows me to work with a much smaller motor.
02:43So the torque hit is pretty instant.
02:56Am I scared driving it? Yeah. You just never know what's going to happen.
02:59Is something going to fall off? Is it going to blow up?
03:01I really have no idea.
03:03So you can see why you could do 80.
03:06But do you really want to do 80 in this?
03:12My favorite thing about this is definitely the look that you get from people
03:15that expect a big honking engine to be in the front.
03:21It looks like it's not supposed to move at all,
03:23but it's not going to move at all.
03:25It's not going to move at all.
03:27It's not going to move at all.
03:29It's not going to move at all.
03:31It looks like it's not supposed to move at all.
03:33There's nothing up front.
03:35It just looks like a bunch of computer equipment slapped together.
03:41Why the electric hot rod? I wanted to do it.
03:43It just had to get done at some point.
03:45I feel like it really captures the spirit of hot rodding.
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