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]

Click on the Lohrner-Porsche for a high-res gallery

While most people think of Toyota and Honda as the pioneers of hybrid power-train technology, the idea actually goes back many decades before either company existed. The man behind the all-wheel drive Auto Union Grand Prix cars of the 1930s got his start in the auto business before the turn of the twentieth century. Ferdinand Porsche's first car designs were actually electric vehicles with the world's first hub motors. The limitations of battery technology (where have we heard that one before? I guess big oil was suppressing battery tech even a century ago) prompted Porsche to evolve his design into a range extended EV, creating a serial hybrid.

Sitting adjacent to the new Porsche Cayenne Hybrid at the LA Auto Show was the lone remaining example of the original Lohner-Porsche electric carriage. The hub motors on the front wheels put out 2.5 hp continuously and up to 7 hp for short bursts. That's enough for "cruising" at 10 mph with a top speed of 31 mph. The 80V 40 Ah battery could potentially give a range of up to thirty miles. After its debut in 1900, Lohner built and sold over 300 of the pioneering EVs. Porsche later also created the first all wheel drive car when he added the hub motors to the rear wheels.


[Source: Porsche]

In the last couple of years, green car enthusiasts have gotten all hot and bothered by the idea of cars like the Tesla Roadster, Zap-X and Chevrolet Volt. And while these cars and others seem incredibly innovative today, in reality they all have roots in cars built over a century ago by one of the true innovators in the history of the automobile, Ferdinand Porsche.

Most know Porsche for the line of sports cars bearing his name or a round little car that came from Wolfsburg Germany or the insanely fast Auto Union Grand Prix cars of the 1930s. Early in his career in 1898, Porsche developed an electric hub motor design that was incorporated into a series of cars that eventually won a number of competitions. Ultimately Porsche even developed a series hybrid version with an engine that only ran a generator to charge the batteries. Sound familiar? Then, as now, the limiting factor was battery technology. A 1900 example will be shown on the Porsche stand at the LA Auto Show next week alongside the new Cayenne hybrid which is being displayed in the US for the first time.

[Source: CNN Money]