00:00 No one's ever taken an electric motorcycle motor and put it in a car before.
00:05 This thing will do 80 no problem all day long.
00:07 But do you really want to do 80 in this?
00:10 Am I scared driving it? Yeah. You just never know what's going to happen.
00:13 My name is Rich and I run a YouTube channel called Rich Rebuilds.
00:22 And this is my 1930s rat rod Ford Model A.
00:26 If I could describe it in three words, I'd say it's a work of art.
00:30 I mean, just look at it. It's just beautiful.
00:33 It's about 11 feet long and about 5 feet wide.
00:36 It weighs about, I would say, between 12 and like 1300 pounds or so.
00:40 And what powers this thing, the heart of it is an electric motor
00:45 out of an electric motorcycle that got wrecked.
00:47 And I figured as much, you know what?
00:49 Why not throw in a rat rod and see what it can do?
00:51 So right here we have the motor itself.
00:53 I had a custom made transmission adapter.
00:56 This is actually the battery pack itself.
00:58 It looks like a computer case. Everyone gets super confused over it.
01:01 This is actually a transmission out of an old '60s Chevy.
01:05 It's a three-speed manual. That's how it gets up to speed so fast.
01:08 Because it's a multi-gear transmission,
01:10 it accelerates pretty quickly for that small baby motor.
01:13 These seats are actually the third row seats from an old Dodge Caravan minivan.
01:18 I have the gauge cluster from the motor itself.
01:20 And right here I have the turn signals.
01:23 I have the high beams, speedometer.
01:26 So everything that I could, all the electronics were grafted from the bike,
01:30 and it went onto the rat rod.
01:32 [music]
01:33 It took about six weeks to build from start to finish.
01:36 [music]
01:38 Woo!
01:39 That's why we have the shield.
01:41 [music]
01:43 Figuring out how to mate the electric motor to the transmission,
01:46 that was a big challenge.
01:48 And the second challenging part was figuring out the accelerator pedal.
01:51 [music]
01:52 On a motorcycle, there's actually a twist throttle.
01:55 So I had to figure out how to mount it up front
01:57 and turn that twist pedal into the stepping motion that you're normally used to in a car.
02:02 I actually attached a manual cable.
02:04 So whenever I step on the foot pedal, it turns it that way.
02:08 [music]
02:09 The first test drive was interesting because there were a lot of naysayers
02:12 saying that the small electric motor would be too small.
02:15 There were a lot of naysayers saying that the small electric motor
02:18 wouldn't be able to actually move the car.
02:20 I was like, "Is it going to go anywhere? Can it even accelerate?"
02:23 And it sure did.
02:25 [laughs]
02:26 Woo!
02:27 [music]
02:37 The acceleration is surprisingly good.
02:39 What I do is I put it in first gear, and I just jam the accelerator pedal,
02:42 and it actually goes really, really well.
02:45 [music]
02:47 The transmission allows me to work with a much smaller motor,
02:50 so the torque hit is pretty instant.
02:52 [music]
03:03 Am I scared driving it? Yeah.
03:05 You just never know what's going to happen.
03:06 Is something going to fall off? Is it going to blow up?
03:08 I really have no idea.
03:10 Ah, see, there you go. It ran right there.
03:13 So you can see why you could do 80,
03:16 but do you really want to do 80 in this?
03:18 [laughs]
03:19 [music]
03:22 My favorite thing about this is definitely the look that you get from people
03:25 that expect a big honking engine to be in the front.
03:29 [music]
03:31 It looks like it's not supposed to move at all.
03:33 There's, like, nothing up front.
03:35 It just looks like a bunch of computer equipment slapped together.
03:38 [music]
03:41 Why the electric hot rod? I wanted to do it.
03:43 It just had to get done at some point.
03:45 I feel like it really captures the spirit of hot rodding.
03:48 [music]
