News

Today sees the premier of the first in our regular series of update videos on our Electric Classic Car conversions.

In part one of the series on this Reliant Scimitar we give you an introduction to the project and an outline of the concept for this car.

Let us know if you have any questions 🙂

Video transcript

In the video I will introduce you to this Reliant Scimitar Electric Conversion

The car is a 1977 Reliant Scimitar GTE with a 3 litre V6 – The Essex V6 that was also used in a number of Ford vehicles including the Granada, Capri & Transit. For this electric conversion it was decided to use the complete system from a Nissan leaf to convert the car to electric.

The concept for this vehicle was to give it similar performance to the original engine whilst using as much of the Nissan leaf drive train as possible. This conversion will feature the LEAFs Motor, inverter, batteries, transmission, accelerator pedal, charge ports battery management system and PDM. The PDM houses the charger and DC/DC converter

The motor is the 80kw version and is coupled to the single speed transmission. The concept is to replace the rear live axle with the motor and transmission mounted in a custom frame  along with the inverter which is now sperate to the motor to allow packaging under the original floor.

Locating the motor, inverter and transmission in the rear will then enable us to install a single battery box under the bonnet and in the transmission tunnel where the engine and gearbox once was. The single battery box will house all of the LEAFS modules and mount to the mounting points used by original drivetrain. The battery is coming from the same 24kWh LEAF that donated the other components.

The car was bought at auction a couple of years ago by the customer and as you can see its in a tidy functional condition with plenty of character. The intention is that once converted the car will get a full restoration of the bodywork & interior by a Scimitar specialist.

The donor LEAF was bought by the customer and we then went about dismantling it. Removing the motor stack batteries and all other required components. Later in the project we actually rebuilt the car with other components we had and put it back on the road as I couldn’t bear a none damaged LEAF being taken off the road.

The scimitar then had its body taken off the chassis so that a chassis specialist could locate the rear motor layout and restore the chassis. 

We will be posting regular updates of this and other build so please like abd subscribe to keep up to date with progress.

Excellent, I got through the whole video without mentioning Princess Anne. OH BUGGER!