00:00No one's ever taken an electric motorcycle motor and put it in a car before.
00:08This thing will do 80, no problem, all day long, but do you really want to do 80 in this?
00:12Am I scared driving it? Yeah, you just never know what's going to happen.
00:16My name is Rich and I run a YouTube channel called Rich Rebuilds and this is my 1930s
00:27Rat Rod Ford Model A. If I can describe it in three words, I'd say it's a work of art.
00:32I mean, just look at it. It's just beautiful. It's about 11 feet long, about 5 feet wide.
00:39It weighs about, I would say between 12 and like 1,300 pounds or so and what powers this
00:44thing, the heart of it is an electric motor out of an electric motorcycle that got wrecked
00:50and I figured as much, you know what, why not throw in the Rat Rod and see what I can do.
00:54So right here we have the motor itself. I had a custom made transmission adapter.
00:59This is actually battery pack itself. It looks like a computer case. Everyone gets super confused
01:03over it. This is actually a transmission out of an old 60s Chevy. It's a three-speed manual.
01:10That's how it gets up to speed so fast. Because it's a multi-gear transmission, it accelerates
01:14pretty quickly for that small baby motor. These seats are actually the third row seats from
01:19an old Dodge Caravan minivan. I have the gauge cluster from the motorcycle and right here,
01:25I have the turn signals, I have the high beams, speedometer. So everything that I could,
01:30all the electronics were grafted from the bike and it went onto the Rat Rod.
01:36It took about six weeks to build from start to finish.
01:42That's why we have the shield.
01:43Figuring out how to mate the electric motor to the transmission, that was one challenging part.
01:51And the second challenging part was figuring out the accelerator pedal.
01:55On a motorcycle there's actually a twist throttle, so I had to figure out how to mount it up front
02:00and turn that twist pedal into the stepping motion that you're normally used to in a car.
02:06I actually attached a manual cable, so whenever I step on the foot pedal, it turns it that way.
02:11The first test ride was interesting because there were a lot of naysayers saying that the small
02:17electric motor wouldn't be able to actually move the car. I was like, is it going to go anywhere?
02:21Can't even accelerate? And it sure did.
02:36The acceleration is surprisingly good. What I do is I put it in first gear,
02:40and I just jam the accelerator pedal, and it actually goes really, really well.
02:46The transmission allows me to work with a much smaller motor, so the torque hit is pretty instant.
03:03Am I scared driving it? Yeah. You just never know what's going to happen.
03:06Is something going to fall off? Is it going to blow up? I really have no idea.
03:09Ah, see there you go. There's a grind right there.
03:13So you can see why you could do 80, but do you really want to do 80 in this?
03:22My favorite thing about this is definitely the look that you get from people that expect
03:26a big honking engine to be in the front. It looks like it's not supposed to move at all. There's
03:33like nothing up front. It just looks like a bunch of computer equipment slapped together.
03:41Why the electric hot rod? I want to do it. It just had to get done at some point.
03:44I feel like it really captures the spirit of hot rodding.
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