This is a complete, unused conversion kit from EV West to turn a Volkswagen Beetle into a 100% electric car. The kit includes the electric motor, battery modules, and other parts required for the conversion.
This kit is said to be suitable for any Beetle from 1956 to 1977, which covers the vast majority of the model’s production volume, and it will result in a vehicle with an all-electric range of 145 kms or 90 miles per charge.
Volkswagen advertising used to be some of the cleverest in the industry, never failing to get people to stop turning pages in a magazine and actually read it. Image courtesy of Volkswagen AG.
EV West has been in business for well over a decade now, and cars that have been converted using their kits have been featured broadly across the internet including articles on Top Gear, Jalopnik, Autoblog, Gas2, Inside EVs, and on Matt Farrah’s The Smoking Tire podcast.
The company produces kits that can be used for converting a number of classic cars to electric quickly and easily, including the Karmann Ghia, Porsche 356, Porsche 911, Volkswagen Beetle, Porsche 914, Volkswagen Bus (Type 2), and the Volkswagen Thing.
They also sell a wide variety of individual parts for people looking to do their own conversions, including motors, battery modules, wiring, converters, controllers, and more. Many EV West customers have built their own EV conversions for vehicles that don’t have kits pre-made for them.
The team at EV West have built a number of unusual electric vehicles themselves, including a BMW M3 that became a viral internet sensation after competing at the Pikes Peak Hillclimb in 2012.
The EV West VW Beetle Conversion Kit Shown Here
The boxes you see here in this article contain an unused EV West electric conversion kit for a Volkswagen Beetle.
It includes everything you need including a HyPer9 88 kW synchronous AC electric motor, 5 x Tesla-sourced 5.3 kWh battery modules, a motor adapter and flywheel, and the requisite clutch components. The boxes also contain a J1772 charging socket, an Elcon DC-DC converter, and two Elcon chargers.
This kit from EV West contains everything you need to turn a VW Beetle (made between 1956 to 1977) into an electric car with 173 lb ft of torque and a range of 90 miles.
The motor produces 173 lb ft of torque and has a weight of just 120 lbs, a significant performance improvement over the ~61 lb ft of torque provided by the original 1.2 liter flat-four VW engine used in the 1960s.
The total price of this kit when new from EV West was $20,125 USD as of June 2021 when it was delivered. For unknown reasons the current owner now won’t be using the kit, and so they’ve placed it for sale on Bring a Trailer out of Port Washington, New York. If you’d like to read more about it or register to bid you can visit the listing here.
Images courtesy of Bring a Trailer
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
