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How to build your own electric car for £10,000


During the week, Tom Cheesewright advises the likes of Nasa. Weekends, though, are more down to earth: scavenging car breakers’ yards and trawling the internet looking for discarded first-generation hybrid electric car parts.

It’s because he’s building an electric vehicle (EV) on his drive in a Manchester suburb, and fabricating parts for it in a back garden tent.

This is his second attempt at building an EV that resembles a classic car, and both have been constructed around the same MOT-failure BMW Z3 two-seater from 1999. 

The first, which retained the Z3’s bodywork, had a 20-mile range and was used for local trips to shops and schools.

The second, pictured here, is upgraded, has a slightly better range and looks very different – with the Z3 chassis shrouded in a 1950s-style sports car body.

Self-confessed petrolhead Cheesewright, 45, sparked into action during lockdown in 2020: “I was looking at classic cars on YouTube and my kids got excited by the prospect of whether we could have one,” he said.

“But everything they wanted was £500,000, so I said no, but maybe we can make one. So the idea came about, OK, let’s buy an old convertible, convert it to electric and see if we can make it look like something from the 1950s.

“There was also the professional angle: I do a lot of work consulting around the future of transport for organisations like Nasa and some of the big car manufacturers.

“I wanted to understand EVs deep down. What’s better than getting hands-on?”

So he started the scavenge: an electric motor came from eBay, which he found he could make work after acquiring an inverter, a piece of equipment that allows the batteries to power the motor. They – he and his kids – then started acquiring all the other necessary parts, as Cheesewright educated himself on precisely what was required to build an EV.



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