Tesla-powered Vintage Honda Gasser Is Our Kind of Madness
Read that again: Tesla powered. Vintage Honda. Gasser…
We never expected to put those words together in the same sentence to describe a car, but here we are. It might be the most unusual melding of automotive niches possible, and yet, it’s undeniably awesome. And all thanks to its creator, Jim Belosic. So how does one come up with an idea like this? Well, it came from a bit of daydreaming after a short drive in an electric car, and an older Honda that was sitting unused.
Initially it was just supposed to be simple – swap in an electric motor from a wrecked Tesla Model S P85 into Jim’s 1981 Honda Accord. Since the motor, along with a good deal of the suspension and the brakes are all contained in a simple sub-frame, the swap was looking to be fairly simple. That wouldn’t quite be the case, but lead to the best feature of the car. More about that in a bit.
Powering that motor are battery packs from a Chevy Volt. As the battery was shaped like a T and there would be an empty engine bay, the top part of the T would sit where the old motor would, and the rest would sit in the exhaust tunnel under the center console of the car. Now, batteries are quite heavy, but so was that engine originally powered the car. Staggeringly, the swap didn’t even add 100 pounds to the car’s overall weight.
It did add, however, ride height. The simplicity of that rear sub-frame led to another problem since there’d be a whole boat-load of twist going through thin sheet metal around the rear axle. It essentially had to be re-engineered. Adding bracing to allow the sub-frame ended up increasing ride height by about a half a foot, it was thought to completely re-engineer the front end as well.
See more of this badass vintage Honda on the next page!
