Back in the early 1970s when Volkswagen and Porsche collaborated to create the 914 sports car it's unlikely that either company imagined that the little roadster would someday become a popular platform for electric drive conversions. Nonetheless after reporting on a 914 battery conversion by a group of MIT students and their professor last summer, we now have found out about two more such tear-ups. Ross Cunniff of Fort Collins Colorado picked up a rusty 1975 914 a couple of years ago. He then installed an EV conversion kit that included 1,200 pounds of deep discharge lead batteries. He now has a Porsche that cruises easily at 65mph and can reach up to 90mph. Ross has a blog where he's tracking the progress of his project that you can check out here. Then there's this blog covering a similar conversion in Oregon. Given Ferdinand Porsche's pioneering efforts with electric cars and hybrids, it's probably only fitting that people are going back to electron fuel with somewhat more modern Porsches.
[Source: Colorodoan, via GermanCarBlog, thanks to Christian for the tip]
1. I had a 914 back in the early 90s, like 92-94 ish, and even back then people were converting them to electric cars. That's like 16 years ago.
Just sayin' is all. If anyone is interested in tracking that info down, there was a magazine (pre-internet) called "Mid Engine Views" that did a whole issue on electric 914s, probably about 1993 ish.
Posted at 2:36PM on Jan 22nd 2008 by stevejust