Rich from Rich Rebuilds has said many times in his videos that he likes all cars, electric or otherwise. He has also said that he’s building the world’s first V8-powered Tesla Model S just to annoy fans of the brand, as well as have an utterly unique, one-of-a-kind vehicle to drive around and (especially) take to shows like SEMA.
Rich and his team took their new and now completed V8-powered Model S to the 2021 SEMA show where it garnered a lot of attention. However, the show as also packed with cool and unusual EV conversions and he also made an entire video about the best ones he found wandering around the venue.
EV conversions, especially of older classic vehicles, is a hot topic right now especially since it still polarizes opinions. Some say that you ruin a classic if you rip out its ICE power plant and replace it wit something that runs on electrons, which is why many professionally performed conversions are done in such a way that the conversion is fully reversible, so future owners can go back to ICE, if they so choose.
There are also those who make their EV-converted classic look like an ICE vehicle, which is what the first person Rich talks to has done. His 1930s Ford looks like a textbook V8-powered hotrod, but it’s actually fully-electric and the idea behind it was to still have the V8 block up front – you can’t really tell it’s not actually burning gasoline any more, but once you do, you will want to know how, what and why they did it.
It is also perhaps somewhat ironic that Rich put an actual V8 in a Tesla, while this hotrod is fully-electric, but it looks like it has an actual V8… Maybe Rich will get a new idea from this very interesting conversion project. Do also check out Rich’s V8-powered Tesla video, posted below, in order to see the conclusion on that quite controversial build.
