Apologies for the stream of consciousness.
The goal of this first build is mostly to learn. I want to learn about the EV market through hands-on work, I want to learn about the engineering challenges an EV presents, and I’d like to improve my wrenching skills. Along the way I’ll get a bunch of new fun tools and at the end of the project I’ll have a cool car. So, why a Caterham? Why not convert an existing car? It’d probably be easier and cheaper.
My thinking is the following – at some point I’d really like to build and sell an entire car. What better way to learn about the design and manufacturing of the various subsystems than to build a car from scratch? From scratch would be a tough project though – I think it’s more reasonable to start with a kit. Plenty of kit car options out there – the biggest players (at least in the US) seem to be Superformance and Factory Five.
I’m not a huge fan of Cobra replicas. There are tons of them out there, and I dunno, they just don’t do it for me. Too fake. Same goes for the Cobra coupe and GT40. Hot rod? meh. It would be an interesting EV though – I bet it would rub some people the wrong way. The Factory Five GTM and 818 are pretty interesting and tempting. This guy built an electric 818 already. Here’s an interesting GTM hybrid.
I’m liking the Caterham out of all of these for two primary reasons – it’s light and I can find very few that have been converted to electric. Much like the Wrightspeed X1, I think an electric Caterham could drum up a lot of interest and publicity.
So perhaps building this car could serve another purpose – marketing. If that’s the case then I need to add an attribute – it’s got to be notable. In this case, that means making as fast as I can. I’ll probably have to get the higher-end model, I’ll have to get a more expensive powertrain setup, and at a minimum redo the suspension to handle the added weight. The project gets decently more complicated and substantially more expensive at this point.
I fully admit that this is all after-the-fact rationalization. I had the idea of electrifying a Caterham pop up in my head at the gym. I still like the idea and haven’t found good reasons not too. As for making it super fast? I’m still not quite convinced. Maybe that could be round 2. I don’t know quite yet.