Driving AEM's Tesla-powered Mustang

[Hagerty]

Electric motor swaps are gaining mainstream popularity, and that's only going to increase with both Ford's Eluminator and GM's eCrate offerings to come. We even got the chance to drive Ford's Mustang Mach-E-powered F-100 pickup, and our story piqued some interest over at AEM Performance Electronics.
https://www.hagerty.com/media/car-profiles/driving-aems-tesla-powered-mustang/

[pjhay301]

I'm thinking of muscle car sound for my 68 ChargEr likely will come from speakers! Super sleeper indeed. Anything can be replicated.

[Oldroad1]

Howbout FAKE?

[Rival]

I suppose I should learn more about EV conversions before asking questions like this, but on the other hand, asking is how we learn. My question: would it be possible to simply insert an electric motor in the place of the internal combustion engine? I realize it wouldn't be as efficient as having one in the rear axle itself, but moving it to the axle(s) seems to be MUCH more complicated. For instance, take an old SUV - like a Chevy Blazer or Ford Bronco. If you could replace the engine with a motor, you could retain all of the accessories (PS/AC, etc - although you'd have to convert the brakes to Hydroboost) and leave the driveline intact. All of the rest underside of the vehicle could be used for battery storage. Again, I may be missing a huge reason this woudn't be possible, but I thought I'd ask.

[77GL]

Chevy, Jaguar and others already have a small block conversion like that. 9 second quarter mile in a Camaro.

[bblhed]

That is what Bob Batson was doing at EV America back in the 80's and 90's, James Warden did the same thing at Solectria. It is actually quite easy to use a vacuum pump for the brakes, and use a heat pump with it's own motor for HVAC, then use electric power steering. All of this exists now, people just want to ignore it and say the IC engine is better because they say so.

FYI the down side of heat pump HVAC is that the defogger doesn't work quite as well when you can't use the AC to dry the air before heating it, you can use resistive heaters, in defog mode like Tesla and VW do now, but it sucks a lot of battery.

[cyclemikey]

Wonderful. A vintage Mustang without the essence. Or an ersatz Tesla with 100 miles of range. Take your pick. This is a forced marriage where the kids inherit all the worst characteristics of each parent.

If you want to drive a vintage car, drive one. If you want to drive an electric appliance, then drive that. Pretending you can do both at once is silly.

[Air_and_Water]

This is a cobbled-together test bed (hence the name), not something they're trying to sell.

[Oldroad1]

Least they didn't hack a classic.

[franimal007]

I would NEVER park a electric car in my garage. NOT safe. Would have to have a sprinkler system that can deal with electric fires. Would you park one in your attached garage with your family sleeping at night? NOPE! If I EVER am forced to have a electric car, it will be parked outside. With that said, "GO Elon Musk" I do not care for electric cars, but at least you are standing up to the tyranny in DC! Specifically "EW" initials.

[Brandan]

It's a good thing gasoline isn't flammable.

[Oldroad1]

Gasoline can be extinguished. Like phosphorus, Lithium nickel Ion Batteries can only burn to completion and cannot be artificially extinguished even under water. These metals when hot enough to burn create there own oxygen.

[PorscheMan]

Please have an editor review the text before releasing it for public consumption next time.

[JBBearcat]

Cost?
Short term, recharging and long term?
The (London) Daily Telegraph recently did a story about how they couldn't get a straight answer from automakers about battery replacement costs.

Might be fun if I was trying to score points with a gullible college-age girl.

[pjhay301]

Agree 100%

[JagManBill]

its like putting a Chevy engine in a Jag. The whole of the experience is that V12 on song. No Jag engine? It might as well be a Vette or some other mundane form of transportation. E in a Stang? same thing. LARGE part of the experience is, as ATLPaul says the roar of the V8. Would you really want your Roush Mustang to just go 'woosh' when you stand on the go pedal?

[77GL]

Hagerty sure has its share of drama queen readers that are hideously uninformed.

[Oldroad1]

That is why your here.

[Herne]

About the same excitement quotient as driving a forklift. It may be quick, but it’s soulless

[slombard]

Car's don't have souls. Neither do people, for that matter.

[Billthecat707]

Just the souls(😄) of there feet.

[MAXTHEAX]

Electric vehicles are popular with golfers and that's fine. I worked at a country club for the summer when I was thirteen and one of my duties was hooking those POS to chargers as soon as they returned from a booze cruise around the links. That was enough make me want to stop using a toaster as a form of protest!
Rowing the gears and hearing all the mechanical sounds are what driving is about. You in charge. From what Elong Mollusk has shown us an electrical vehicle is all about a computer deciding what to hit, emergency vehicles or trees, lamp posts.... Taking a perfectly good LS powered Camaro and turning it into a mix master is the equivalent of second degree murder.

[77GL]

Nobody is forcing anything on anyone. EVs are a wonderful alternative for many including eliminating leaky, smelly engines, transmissions, gas tanks, gas lines, oil changes, gas station fillups. Alternatives are good for the hobby.

[Tinkerah]

...water pumps, radiators, coolant hoses, timing belts, catalytic converters, etc. etc. etc.

[DonLafferty]

Please don't kill me until you read everything. Then kill away.

I own a Tesla Model 3 which will beat about 99.5% of the cars on the road to 60 mph and 98% of them to 100. It does the quarter in 11.8 seconds. That's quick. Very quick. I drive it almost everywhere I go and that includes Phoenix to LA. It's slightly longer to do supercharging but most people stop for lunch and potty breaks so it's only a minor inconvenience.

In spite of what many anti-EV people say, they are Zero Emissions but only after about 6-7 years. They are actually dirtier as those people like to say but they even that out. Once they reach that point they truly are ZE provided you charge it from Solar or Wind or Dam power but of course those have their own break even point.

That all said, I also own a Jaguar XKR that has 400HP and a supercharger that whines very nicely. I wouldn't want to drive my EV all the time and I don't. I drive the Jag (with the top down) quite a bit. It has the muscle car sound and fills that void I get from the Tesla.

As many have pointed out, EVs are the future. Not for the Green so much as for oil is finite. The sun and wind aren't. It probably won't run out in most of our lifetimes but getting energy from the sun is free once you pay for it and clean once you zero that out. It is the future. Kicking and screaming many will go, but they will eventually go.

[Oldroad1]

This country alone has over a thousand years worth of untapped reserves. Crude and LNG. To me, that's infinite.

[2014V6]

I live in Colorado, 100 miles won’t get me to and from my home to Denver and back. And 250 (current Tesla estimates) miles won’t get me from my home to Grand Jct. But what’s really sad,I just just read an article by John Porter :”What is a battery” (Feb. 2022). The typical 1,000 pound Tesla battery requires 25 lbs of lithium, 60 lbs of nickel, 44 lbs of nickel, 30 lbs of cobalt, 200 lbs of copper and 400 lbs plus of aluminum, steel and plastic. And it requires mining 250-500,000 pounds of earth crust FOR just ONE battery. Such mining on an even larger scale cannot be considered environmentally safe or ‘greener’ for anyone on this planet. When we ever get the whole picture? Why are people so easily influenced to buy the latest buzzword about going green?

[Oldroad1]

So much for clean renewable energy. Mining destroys the earth in more ways than tapping oil reserves.

[DAY]

When the JAB nano coating wears off (yes it has a nano coating) and the Real effects start killing off or sterilizing the population, they won't need to dig so much! Only the rich left behind will need the electric golf carts. Take one trip to the local Sam's club to see the line of cars waiting up to ten minutes to get to a fuel pump. Then imagine the line of EV cars waiting at charging stations, AND EACH ONE TAKING 2 TO 8 HOURS TO CHARGE! INSANITY!

[Bship]

I’m seriously beginning to think these EV cheerleaders just don’t have sense enough to know when to back off. Human nature being what it is,I think most people resent a constant barrage of people telling them what’s good for them,and how we’d all better get ready because these are the wave of the future. And from the tenor of most of the comments here,I’d say there’s a lot of drivers who don’t like being forced into things they don’t want any part of.

[Oldroad1]

I'm hip to that!

[EventHorizons]

It's interesting the visceral divide between the camps on this. Reminds me of other venues in this great country.
The reality is that an EV conversion or a BEV is not everybody's cup of tea. I respect that. Everything depends on what you want to get from it. What is the mission?

I personally love the roar of a ICE and the thrill of trying to keep it straight as I perform a full power launch!

But I also love the pure acceleration at any speed and the silence from electric propulsion, the hassle-free operation of a BEV and there are few things I like less then having to stop for gas.

My '71 911E will never see an electric motor but my '66 Squareback is a prime candidate and I am just waiting for retirement to do the deed!

[Air_and_Water]

Agreed except for one thing. I don't want gobs of EV power coupled with swingaxle suspension! 😉
Batteries for the daily slog to work and back and carburetors for the weekend. 😄

[CashsMom]

No. As in h*ll no

[UncleAl]

That's good, just send all your gas guzzling drivetrains to me. I'll take them all, and call it my 401K.

[2014V6]

And then we’ll bury the dead when all the toxic wastes from 1,000 pound batteries start a toxic pollution that will make coal fired plants look tame.

[tvjake2]

I'm not trying to knock Mustangs but the recent iterations of that car always sound loud, but the engine seems to be working harder than the car is accelerating. In other words they make a lot of noise (some a LOT of noise) with not much "go".

[Cobra5oh]

Might as well just “drive” a video game car. This is like paying your neighbor to make you a kid with your wife. Completely missed the point of what a Mustang is.

[KYColonel]

There's absolutely no way that I would drive such a ridiculous abomination.
If someone gave it to me, I would sell it for scrap just to get it off the road.

[Lance225]

It is sacrilegious to turn a mustang gt into a golf cart. This countries grid is ten years away from being able to handel the electric vehicles the socialist, aka progressives , want us to drive. No one has thought about what to do with all these poisonous batteries when these EV are out of service and scrapped. If I took a trip of 300 miles in my engine car, I can fill up in 5-7 minutes and go another 300. In an electric motor car ,if a winter storm hasn't killed the grid, I would have to charge 45 min to go another 300 miles. That is unless it's a GM electric car, then it would just catch on fire

[Brandan]

How is the gas station going to pump gas when the grid is down?

[Oldroad1]

Good question.

[tcchuck2005]

I would much rather drive that than a Prius or Leaf.

[Reinhold_Weege]

Like the other poster said, make sure you read to the end.

I'm far removed from wanting one of these, but I don't necessarily hate it either. There are plenty of otherwise fun/interesting cars with crappy ICE drivetrains. So no, I wouldn't swap a muscle car for this, but something like a 1990 Chrysler/Maserati TC with a Made-so-shoddy V6? Sure. It's a fun roadster with a nice interior and a garbage engine. (I would not swap any turbo version with a 5-speed.) No harm, no foul. And I can dust Miata's for laughs while using my gathered-leather map pockets to hold-my-beer. Not that anyone should do that. But I could. 

No, the government shouldn't be jamming this down our throats. Yes these things are going to require flooding parking garages when they burn, plus the smoke is full of Hexoflorides and Heavy Metals, so probably condemn the whole building. Yes, the infrastructure will fail and electric rates are going to make us wish for $5 gas.

But to stick a 400 HP electric motor into an otherwise handicapped car? Sure. Think of it like a 40-y/o baseball player juiced up on Anavar... Sure his heart is going to explode, and he should never be in the Hall of Fame but it's fun to watch him hit home runs.

[Cobra5oh]

I wouldn’t let you leave it in my Yard. Junk

[RetroRock]

Just because all cars can be converted to Electric doesn't mean all should...
The one I agree with most is the soon to be all Electric DeLorean, although it's beginning to look like it's going to undergo a complete facelift and be unrecognizable.
That's a shame...

[Mechanic39]

EVs and new Turbocharged & GDI ed cars hold a real problem for me. An EV like the Testang with a 100 mile range w/o AC in Warm Southern California would do far worse in Northern climes where sub 40 degrees F will very likely reduce the range by 40%. Then there is the safety issue that these battery packs can and do catch fire. It was reported that a Tesla Model S that caught fire required 3800 gallons of H2O to put the fire out. Then there is the issue of battery pack replacement. $12,000 or more for a Tesla. $4,500 or more for a Toyota Prius. This cost shouldn't bother an owner who turns in a car prior to 50,000 miles, but knowing you have that battery replacement cost coming if you buy a used EV closing in on 80k to 100k miles makes buying a used model real problematic. $12,000 buys a lot of fuel. I would prefer to wait for the Solid state battery to replace Lithium Ion battery packs. Their range is said to be up to 1000 miles and time to charge to 80% full is under 8 minutes. Question is: How long before they become available? As for Turboed GDI engines, They tend to burn oil before 80,000 miles (EVEN WITH proper maintenance). That is a problem if you are looking to buy used car with these engines. Call it ecoboost if you like but it raises a red flag for me. And it's Government regs. that dictate their existence. I would prefer a naturally aspirated Straight 6, then a V6 then a straight 4 for everyday driver and a V8 for my weekend toy - than you very much!

[limoguy]

When buying a used electric vehicle, the cost of battery replacement will figure into the acquisition price.

[Oldroad1]

Ya. The seller would have to give you the BEV with a next to dead battery in which case there would be no takers. I'm hedging that in the near future there will be many BEV owners stuck with a 2 ton paper weight. Some will bite the bullet and replace the battery hoping nothing else will fail or they'll end up scrapping their EV only to pay for battery disposal which will be costly.

[MustangJim]

I get this...it is what hot rodding is about. Its all experimention and that eventually trickles down. Would I drive it? I guess but I would not keep it. I just went out to the garage where my 08 GT is , opened the hood and all is ok with the world as I know it. I wish the roads we're not covered with a fresh layer of salt.. I needed to hear it after this article
Thank you for presenting this to us, it is interesting to see.

[38Chevy454]

My hot rods and muscle cars are hybrids, they burn gas and rubber!