If you want to get a car sideways, it helps to have a lot of torque on the rear wheels. Considering how long some high performance electric vehicles have been around, it’s no wonder that somebody would go and try to take something like a Nissan 350Z and throw in some Tesla hardwareto make it really run.
That’s exactly what the folks on the throtl YouTube channelare doing, or at least trying to do. In the first video of what’s likely going to be a long ongoing series, the car quickly reveals that it’s going to be hard to mount the Tesla motor unit under the back of the car without having to completely re-fabricate most of the rear end.
The problem here is that the overall Tesla motor unit is wider than the current rear subframe of the 350Z, which is immediately obvious even from a few lazy measurements.Most of the mounting points for the motor are too wide to just bolt right into the car in its current from.
While we do love EVs for being relatively simple in the number of parts needed to make them go (Tesla’s motor unit is big in general but small compared to, say, the 350Z’s original V6, transmission, driveshaft, diff, and so on) making it all fit where it was never intended to go makes things start to look massive. It’s no big surprise that a shop like EV West, a specialist in EV conversion, trades in a lot of Porsches and VWs, as a recent Hoonigan shop tour will show you:
EV conversions are very exciting, and for a car like this, it makes total sense. Just know that it may be important to have the money, time, and equipment resources to potentially completely modify the frame of a car.
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