The Aussies Converting Classic Cars Into EVs

As Australian drivers go electric en masse amidst global uncertainty around fuel prices, classic car lovers might feel left behind. A Melbourne-based workshop is doing the work to make sure they can join the party, converting the automotive stars of yesteryear into EVs.

Fancy A Quiet Little Jaunt?

Whether you’ve got an irrational attachment to a cult classic Land Rover, Mini, Porsche, Volkswagen, Corvette or an oddball like an International Scout, the crowd of weirdos at Jaunt Motors in Melbourne will make it into an EV.

This is not some backyard operation. These are people with passion and first-hand experience from the automotive industry. They have a clean workshop with an original equipment mentality for quality control and proper engineering.

As a restorer of old junk myself, it’s almost intimidating to see how clinical this operation is.  They really are taking this seriously and I’m sure the invoicing is reassuringly expensive to match.

The “laboratory” at Jaunt where high and low voltage wiring looms, control gear and ancillaries are put together.

Australians Still Love To Build Cars

We live in a car culture where people have real emotional connections to their wheels, and to be honest, aside from burnout comps, this isn’t a bad thing.

Cars that people care for actually last. They don’t get thrown away, and that’s ultimately much more sustainable than any recycling program.

Plug in Porsche 911.

Conventional wisdom says there’s something like 100 tonnes of raw materials invested in every tonne of new car produced. Preserving that invested energy is greener than grinding it up and pouring more resources into rolling, pressing and casting new parts.

This means places like “Rare Spares” have been bought up by large automotive supply chains. Despite arguably losing some local touch, the corporate heft means there’s happily more money for tooling, so you can buy new parts for 30, 40, 50 & 60-year-old cars.

Custom EV instruments look like old Smiths ones but lots of the factory switches are available new.

The UK has been doing the same for many years too, simply continuing to supply parts and repair the cars they used to make, albeit in a much lower volume.

When Rover stopped production of the original Mini in 2000, the press tooling was removed from the factory, modified to produce Mk 1 1960 details, and within weeks it was back in service, making brand-new panels for 40-year-old cars.

How Does This Impact Australia?

Well we had a lot of English cars, our tariffs, quotas & local content law meant they had to be built here in many cases. It meant we had onshore industry for defence projects, so Australian army LandRovers were built here too.¹

Jaunt have a great catalogue of reproduction parts available to repair Australian-delivered vehicles from Morris, Leyland, Rover, Triumph, Jaguar, and many others, famous for their oil leaks.

Jaunt get new axles in from the UK and then whack a Tesla model 3 motor in the middle of the car. It’s perfectly simple.

In fact, Jaunt have complete EV conversion packages that come in large lumps straight from Felten in the UK. Your Mini will have a completely new chassis subframe, driveshafts, hubs and brakes. It’s not just new bearings and a lick of paint.

Happily, the folks from Felten realise that Jaunt have a brilliant Land Rover EV conversion, and they send parts for that back to old limey for 4WD enthusiasts who prefer to lie back and think of England.

A remarkable amount of work goes into making a slightly oversized “fuel filler” just to get that factory look for a charging port

Jaunt are making cars as functional art. Like the “Snowgum” LandRover which has native eucalypt timber accents inside.

Plus, custom-designed, boutique woven, woollen trim material, grown by native sheep of the snowy mountains. They even made bronze castings of topographical maps featuring the snowy landscape on the ‘guards.

I Lament The Loss Of Australian Made Cars

It’s not just that Ford’s 6 cylinder Barra engine now has a cult following in the USA, that the Falcon’s technical specification would run rings around the Mustang, or that the guys from Top Gear loved flogging a Vauxhall Monaro around England.

For a rear wheel drive niche, Australians made a world-class product, we sold cars into Detroit. There was even a time when the only Commo’ you couldn’t buy with All Wheel Drive was the sedan.

We had an amazing array of large and small businesses that relied on the industrial capacity car making drove. And it meant that you could buy Australian-made & designed parts, like Bosch alternators, Preslite wiper motors, ROH wheels and Hella lamps for your trailer.

And when the volunteers from SteamRanger heritage railway needed a new steam header for locomotive 520, there were car people who would donate their time to design the complex iron casting and a car company where the mould was made.

Sir Malcolm Barclay-Harvey still needs work.

There was employment in cars. One of my best mates got his first job out of university engineering the Mitsubishi Magna and 380. My best man designed mirrors for export to the US for Ford F150s.

As uni students, they both had production-line jobs at the MMAL foundry, fettling castings produced for Mitsubishi at Tonsley. That sort of production line work is hard graft and excellent experience for the people who would go on to design the products professionally.

What Happened?

It wasn’t a want of technology or innovation. The CSIRO developed a hybrid eCommodore to show off at the 2000 Olympics, even before the Toyota Prius and lithium batteries were a thing.

The 1970s fortress of 54% tariff protection was silly, but falling to 5%, the Button plan went too far. All car-making countries offer some protection to their industry, but ours had the least.

I recall first hand Holden running a profitable third shift producing 24 hours a day, but when the Aussie exchange rate hit $1.10 US it caused a conniption for Australian exporters. We could have protected local manufacturing, like we help farmers in a drought, but halving support, then daring carmakers to leave was sadly the certainty they were looking for.

The small scale of Australia’s car industry was always an issue, but it’s great to see existing local expertise employed by firms like Jaunt, getting involved in the world’s automotive future.

For more on electric car ownership, read our detailed guide to EVs and charging.