Current EV Motors Founder Rocco Calandruccio grew up surrounded by cars; his grandfather opened a Ford dealership and then a Buick dealership and collected vintage and sports cars throughout his life. Calandruccio’s family lived in a rural part of Tennessee, where it wasn’t uncommon to find fields full of “rusting carcasses” of vehicles that had been abandoned when the engines or transmissions had failed.
Calandruccio had those rusted-out cars on his mind when he started his company. He wasn’t willing to accept that cars are disposable entities and set out to figure out a way to give them new lives. Centered on that goal, Calandruccio secured two patents for EV conversion kits. Internal combustion engines are complicated beasts with thousands of failure points, he says; he wants to provide a simplified, streamlined path to all-electric driving.
Here’s Calandruccio’s plan to bring EV conversions mainstream.
Bypassing the transmission
Crate engines have been available for decades. These fully assembled internal combustion engines provide a cornerstone for automotive restoration projects as replacement or power upgrades. You can buy a basic LS9 block with nothing else included, or opt for a package like Chevrolet’s “connect and cruise” setup that also contains a transmission.
Less common is what Chevrolet calls an “eCrate,” which includes a single all-electric motor and some of the elements you’d need to convert a gas-powered GM vehicle to an EV. The kit includes a low stall torque converter, transmission control module kit, flex plate, and hardware. Launched just this year, Chevrolet presents the eCrate as a motor “designed to connect directly to a GM 4-speed automatic transmission with an external mode switch.”
One defining aspect of the eCrate is the standard one-size-fits-all 66 kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack. For scale, Chevy’s Bolt carried a 66-kWh battery for a little more than 250…
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