Colorado gearheads are turning classic cars into electric vehicles

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The day the mean man came to sign the papers buying her family’s trusty, beloved Volkswagen bus, the bone-rattling funmobile that had carried her to soccer practice and conquered two 10,000-mile family road trips, Gracie Cole cried. 

This is Gracie in a rare nonkinetic moment in the back of the van during a family camping trip.

The day her older brother, years later, found the classified ad offering the family’s van back on sale from the very same (not so mean) man, Gracie Cole vowed the friendly blue beast would never leave the family again. 

This is Gracie Cole, age 39, taking a break from her job engineering spacesuits to show off the now whisper-quiet electric VW van. It runs on more Tesla batteries than are in an actual Tesla, after she recruited 14 fellow School of Mines students to convert it as their senior capstone project.

We promise this next part is not a digression. This is Gracie Cole while becoming the first woman to ride solo across the United States. On a unicycle. 

(Provided by Gracie Cole)

This is Gracie Cole taking a break at the South Pole from her job pumping aircraft fuel at McMurdo Station:

(Provided by Gracie Cole)

This is Gracie Cole slinging homemade burritos from the electrified VW van on a typical Buena Vista Saturday to make travel money: 

(Provided by Gracie Cole)

The point being, Gracie Cole has a maddening habit of turning just about anything she thinks of into reality. So why does she spend so much time thinking about cramming batteries into a German-made van still sporting donut crumbs from her childhood? 

“I think in general, I really like having a full understanding of the things I care most about. And in this case, it’s the bus,” Cole said, laughing, at her Buena Vista home, somewhere between finishing that spacesuit and resuming construction with her husband on a backyard skatepark.

(This you, Gracie?)

(Provided by Gracie Cole)

Professional engineer and fulltime life enthusiast Cole is part of a long American tradition: Employing inanimate wrenches and hammers to uncover a classic car’s soul. 

Or, as she puts it: 

“It’s been a great opportunity for me to learn about electromechanical interfaces in general, and then to apply it to a project that has my heart.”

And now, as the world turns slowly and then quickly from cars powered by fossil fuels to those running on cleaner electric power, these soulful tinkerers and mechanics are changing classic car culture one dream at a time. 

If you could take your favorite car shape and pack in enough batteries to transform it into something that drives faster, quieter, cleaner and cheaper — and you knew how to do it yourself — why wouldn’t you? “I work on cars” is an age-old personal creed now accelerating at the speed of light. 

“Cars are cool,” said Skyler McKinley, regional director of public affairs for AAA auto club in Colorado. “They’re a cornerstone of our national identity because of how they’ve shaped millions of individual identities; there’s a reason nearly everyone can remember their first car.”

Personalizing a favorite ride through batteries is just the latest move in a great tradition of cars keeping up with technology and society, McKinley said. 

“This go-around,” he said, “they’re going electric in the understanding that if both cars and what cars represent in American culture are going to survive, even the classics must become cutting edge.” 

Getting the bug for an electric Beetle 

As Kevin Spencer drove home the aging shell of the ’67 Volkswagen Beetle he’d just bought from a stranger, it was hard to keep his eyes locked on his conversion dreams, what with all the fuel smoke leaking into the passenger cabin. 

Also distracting: Wondering how long it would take a tow truck to reach him on U.S. 36 on his way back to Longmont. 

Spencer’s technical knowledge as an auto electrician couldn’t save him. But his perseverance and problem-solving from a former Army career helped a bit: Like many choking Beetle owners before him, he rolled down the windows, on a 15-degree day, and soldiered on. 

Spencer’s quest was to get the sputtering Beetle home to his exurban Longmont garage, rip out the offending trunk-mounted engine, and join the 21st-century electric revolution. 

“I made a video at a gas station saying this was literally the last time I was putting gas in this car,” Spencer said. “I put it in the garage and said it’s not coming out until it’s electric.”

“And that’s what I did.” 

Accelerate to a June morning with the gleaming white Beetle parked at his curbside, and yet another random passerby calling it a beauty and doing a double-take when they hear it’s electric. 

The Beetle’s full-metal dashboard, the last model year to feature it, glows under the sun. The trunk is full of second-hand Tesla batteries, the formerly empty VW hood space filled with a spotless electric motor Spencer has dubbed “Firefly” in lasered letters.

Even for an experienced technician like Spencer, who taught Army classes and ran his own auto shops, a classic conversion to electric is still an improvised, cut-and-paste job. Cars in ’67 were not shaped with 2023 Tesla battery specs in mind. Fifty years of plastics-connoisseur mice have assaulted the wiring. EV tinkerers find gurus and mentors on Instagram, YouTube and Reddit forums, with the Brits apparently out far ahead on making conversions teachable. 

Ten to 15 years ago, the first group of conversion hobbyists used electric battery modules from forklifts. Battery technology keeps getting better and better, Spencer said, expanding the possibilities of classics where you can squeeze in electronics. Tesla puts 16 battery packs into many of its models, and converters can break up and repurpose the Tesla concept into larger or smaller combinations to squeeze into their preferred classic.

Spencer’s Beetle has five Tesla modules, while Gracie Cole’s van tops the demands of an actual Tesla at a hefty 17. 

And then there’s the thing about the license plates. 

Custom EVs are so new the state of Colorado doesn’t know what to do with them. Spencer believes he’s the first Coloradan to get an official EV license plate for a converted car. It took some slow-speed navigating through the bureaucracy, which kept punching in the VIN of his Beetle and seeing it come up “gasoline.” 

And the rigorous Colorado emissions regime? They seemed more confused than anyone by a Beetle born under the Shell sign and reborn with electrons. 

“Finally I went to the state and said, ‘I don’t think you know the process,’ and they said, ‘We don’t have a process,’” Spencer laughed.

The bureaucracy is ethereal, but the final results are solid state. Spencer’s spiffed-up Beetle rides like a 21st century rocket instead of a flower-powered hippy dome. The VW has style, speed and 200 miles of range. 

What all mechanics love about going electric is the instant torque when stepping on the “gas.” 

“These cars used to go zero to 60 in a week,” Spencer said. 

Spencer paid about $10,000 for the barely working Beetle shell, then spent about $7,500 on batteries and $6,000 on the electric motor. He has not put a price on the hundreds of hours bent over in his garage, in the afternoons when he’d finished morning shifts driving Uber. 

He’d like to turn his love of conversions into a business, taking on other peoples’ favorite classics one at a time. Spencer has put out videos with hundreds of thousands of views, and has a few thousand Instagram followers. A wealthy Florida collector is talking to him about shipping out an REO (think Model T lookalike and “Time for me to fly” by REO Speedwagon):

Spencer’s next personal car goal is to get hold of a VW van like Gracie Cole’s, electrify it, and add solar panels that could fold out from the roof. 

“I want to just cross the U.S. in it and not pay anything,” Spencer said. “There’s no transportation fees, no plug-in-into-electric-charger fees, it would charge itself. So that’s the dream.”

As a side business, he’s electrifying everything else. Everywhere Spencer sees an engine spewing diesel fumes, he thinks he could make it run better with an electric motor and battery. He’s got a friend in the tree-trimming business who is tired of sucking fossil fumes all day. 

“So I’m going to convert his wood chipper,” Spencer said. 

The Corvair: Uncool at any speed, until now

It may not take a rocket scientist like Gracie Cole to manage a major classic car conversion to an EV. But it might take a systems engineer. 

Like Summer Schneider, of Portland, Ore. He grew up in the Detroit mecca for car lovers. 

“Cars have been a big part of my life,” Schneider said. 

He’d always loved the 1960s Chevy Corvair, which were legendary or notorious, depending on whom you ask and whether you’ve read consumer advocate Ralph Nader’s “Unsafe at Any Speed.” 

To Schneider, the Corvair was an innovative American attempt to match the popularity of a cheap, populist passenger car like Germany’s VW Beetle. Engineers tossed in other twists, including a rear-mounted, air-cooled engine.

But like Kevin Spencer, Schneider and his wife often found themselves choking on the gas fumes of the ’64 Monza convertible he acquired. They only used it for short trips in the summer. Highway safety was a big question lingering from Nader’s “Unsafe” campaign. 

“Making it into an innovative EV fits squarely into its DNA, in my opinion,” Schneider said. 

Most EV converters, though, immediately or eventually run into some crankcase opposition from the classic car old guard. There’s a vocal subset of car tinkerers who believe restoration and innovation are antithetical. If the sales floor upholstery in 1963 was cloth, go find some good cloth or a good solvent. If the engine ran on gasoline, start tuning the spark plugs. 

“The guys that are purists, that really want a classic, they don’t want to ‘molest’ a classic,” Spencer said. 

In the converters’ experience, most of the old-timers get over it when they see and hear an EV classic in person. So once Schneider got the lingo right —he was severely flamed online for using the term “direct drive” for one of his cars when he should have said “directly coupled” — he forged ahead.

Schneider was trained as a mechanical engineer but also became a systems engineer in his day job. 

“I do my own CAD work,” or computer-aided design. “I do my own fabrication,” he said. “I’m very comfortable with a welder and a soldering iron.” 

He’s putting about $20,000 into his next restoration and electrification project, a 1960 Fiat. Some might see that as an expensive pastime, but as an engineer, Schneider can do the math.

“This is a hobby for me, and $20,000 sounds like a (poop) ton,” Schneider said. “But it will be a 2-year-long project, right? At $20,000 divided by 24, that’s how much I spend a month on my hobby.”

While Schneider appreciates the freedom Americans have to adapt their cars any way they like, it also terrifies him a bit. 

“It’s kind of hilarious that in order for me to add an electrical outlet to my house, I have to get permission from the city and it has to be inspected and stuff like that,” he said. “But I can replace the entire brake system in my car and nobody cares.” 

It’s scary because converting a classic to an EV can create a technical marvel, but a physical loose cannonball. 

“W​hen you put 400 pounds of battery in the front that used to be empty, then you got to really think about vehicle dynamics. You got to think about braking dynamics,” Schneider said.

“It’s good for me, because it makes the conversion attainable,” he said. “But I’m a responsible grown-up, and after I got kids I got more risk-averse. Lots of guys put 800 horsepower in their car and then don’t touch the brakes. What the heck?”

The hard-earned satisfactions for the intrepid converters seem to come every day. It can be the privately, intensely smug feeling Schneider gets while driving the Corvair past a Portland gas station. Oregon requires all gas to be pumped full service, and the combination of price and long rush-hour waits is a constant water cooler conversation. 

“It’s lovely to wake up in the morning with a full ‘tank,’” Schneider said. 

And multiple times a day, for Cole’s sky blue van, or for Schneider’s sweet convertible, or for Spencer’s pristine Bug, public rewards come in pedestrians’ doubletakes. 

As a Beetle that was born loud 56 years ago rolls up in stealth mode. 

“When I drive,” Spencer said, “people don’t hear the engine. So they’re curious.” 

Still, there is one age-old car hacker’s problem that no technology has yet solved. 

“I don’t have tons of space, and I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Schneider said. 

“Now I have two old electric cars. That’s really stupid.”