alt Hacker News1966 Ford Mustang Converted into a Tesla with Working 'Full Self-Driving'
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I used to work at a company that did self driving. The sensor setup was more complicated than Tesla (cameras, lidar, etc), but the fact that FSD can still work on this car despite the cameras being in a different place is really impressive to me. Our sensors were pretty sensitive to accurate calibration, and iirc any time we tried to move our sensor array to a new car it took a ton of work to reconfigure it to make the sensor fusion output work.
Here's one of a fully custom Toyota 4x4 truck getting a Tesla Model 3 motor that I enjoyed. I would love to have a small electric pickup like this, but I don't want to invest $100k to get it done
From the article it sounds like the inverse, they took a Tesla and stuck a classic car exterior shell on it, not transplant the electric car parts into a mustang frame. It is still kind of neat but is not the same thing to me. You don't normally upgrade a classic car by chopping out the entire frame and sticking the body panels onto a modern car.
It would be cool if we saw the separation of drivetrain from body in the automobile market. This happens with heavy trucks, you can buy a "glider" which is a completely new, finished rolling chassis and you provide your own engine. Originally done (I think) to skirt emissions laws but it would be cool to be able to buy the body and the EV drivetrain (and maybe battery packs?) from different vendors, and for EV drivetrains to be more easily fittable to older chassis.
Retro-electric stuff makes so little sense since it's the worst of all worlds. Part of why Teslas get decent range is the slippery body. I wince every time I see people clamoring for the VW Scout reboot. Rivian too with their 140kwh batteries just to give people that nostalgic body-on-frame SUV look with usable range.
I’d love to do something similar to an El Camino. I don’t even need triple digit range; I’d use it as a local runabout, mostly to my art studio.
This sort of conversion gets coverage every once in a while and it's been neat to see old frames getting chopped onto new electric drivetrains. I spoke with one of the people interviewed in this article[1] a couple years back about converting an old truck I have sitting around into an EV.
The Model 3 approach takes their unified rear axle (motor,axle,wheels) and mounts it into an existing frame. Then you just need to find a place to stuff the batteries, retrofit some high-voltage electronics, and you're off to the races. One of the drawbacks of that approach is that it changes the stance of the vehicle, but for this Mustang that doesn't seem to matter much - it still looks classic.
Other converters either go for the high end with a model S and fit the motor into a traditional drivetrain for a sleeper build, or they go for the low end and take an old forklift motor and batteries and build what is effectively a street-legal golf cart. Prices range from $5-100k depending on your level of DIY and how dangerous of a classic car you want on the other side of the process.
[1] https://coloradosun.com/2023/06/25/classic-cars-electric-veh...
That's really cool, though I confess I would have preferred the interior to have been more Mustang and less Model 3. Just a quibble, though, the effort is fantastic.
> It’s likely the first non-Tesla vehicle to run FSD, and it achieves 258 Wh/mi — roughly matching the efficiency of an actual Model 3.
This claim is implausible, right? The Mustang is unambiguously less aerodynamic than the Model 3; there's no way it is achieving similar efficiency, especially at highway speeds.
I have a dream that electric motors + battery get so compact that you can make kits that fit engine blocks and large numbers of cars can be custom swapped relatively cheaply.
Neat. I would have preferred the original interior over Tesla's, but I guess it would then just be an electric conversion and not a "Tesla" conversion with "FSD".
Whatever happened to the electric delorean reboot?
EDIT: at one point whoever owned the name also owned a warehouse of spare parts and was going to produce an electric retrofit kit for the old vehicle, and hinting at manufacturing new ones a la retromod. Whoever owns the name now just has concept rendering on their site and a Solana token, so, little more than a meme coin now :(
I've been waiting for someone to do something like this as long as I've known electric cars to be a thing. I hope they just start making them like this.
When will I be able to get an affordable restomod for my early-2000s Jetta?
I wonder if tesla will see this and try to invalidate the VIN from using FSD
This is such a waste of time and money and wow it’s absolutely gorgeous and I want it
I took my 1972 Dodge small block engine out and converted it to 400 hp. Had to upgrade the transmission, driveline, brakes, radiator, and suspension to match. I self-drive it.
Interesting, love the concept. Don't love the modern interior.
People have been doing these conversions forever with teslas.
Nice work, but is it just me or does this take away from the car’s original spirit?
I know this is not the way the industry or regulations work, but I wish electric car platforms let you pick body styles without waiting for a whole model to come out. I'd love an electric Suzuki Jimny body, and could care less about the driving platform.
There was a shop in Dallas back about 20 years ago that did an electric conversion of a H1 Humvee. Since then there’s been lots more conversions like that and to me that is a valid recycling business.
> It demonstrates that Tesla’s hardware and software stack is more portable than the company’s licensing struggles would suggest.
Unless I missed something, this is a completely unsupported claim by the article. Passion projects and retrofits are nothing at all like manufacturing.
It is basically a Mustang body on a tesla chasis... which misses the point of having a classic car.
While there is nothing wrong with converting your classic car to electric, if the powertrain is shot (they are harder to maintain as they age), but IMO, it looses the charm of the point of having a classical car.
Few years ago, there was a trend to do these conversions, but that stopped as people realised the car loses its charm and the feel of having old classic car, and most of them are not being used as dailies anyways.
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As a classic car owner/hobbyist, this disgusts me. But thankfully there are at least 200k other restored/restorable 60s Mustangs out there.
Oh, a good looking Tesla.
I really like the look of the car, but from the title it sounds like a Mustang has been converted into an FSD Tesla ("teslafied" Mustang) - but Tesla suspension, Tesla interior... this smells like a Mustang body fitted onto a Tesla chassis ("mustangified" Tesla).
I suspect that this might be more of a "Mustang body kit" on a Tesla chassis and not retrofitting the Tesla tech into a Mustang chassis + body. Still cool, but maybe misleading.