After 1 year in its new premises, Kit Lacey of eDub Services gives a tour of his latest projects.
In the video Kit talks about the 1973 VW T2 “Indie” that we followed in its making earlier, which unfortunately has had a bad scratch.
He shows us the super cool Tesla-powered 1991 VW Golf Mk2 project that is going to be fitted with a 53 kWh dual battery pack giving it a range of 150 — 200 miles, and it will even be using the original Tesla A/C system, and behold the ChaDeMo charge port behind the front grill logo!
A full restoration in parallel with electrification is Kit’s favorite project right now: A 1964 BMW 700 that’s going to have a 26 kWh battery (in front where the gas tank used to be!) giving a range of 70 — 100 miles. It will be powered by the popular Hyper 9 motor with a custom adapter plate to utilize the original gearbox. And look at those Tesla-like door handles!
We revisit an earlier converted a 1973 VW T2 with a Nissan Leaf kit, but it has issues, so what will he do about that? In line with this Kit informs us that he has a future project of powering a VW T 6.1 with a Tesla drivetrain.
Kit also wants to do a running line for order of converted Vespa T5 scooters! Range will be decent and it will have an adequate 4 kW hub motor.
If you want to see some of these beauties in real life, eDub is to found at the Fully Charged festival and the British Motor Show later this year.
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After seeing this video I had a chat with Kit:
Jesper: “You have been in the game for some years now. We know that from the Indie series. How do you see this retrofit market developing? Is it exploding or growing slowly? Is it shifting more from home garage DIY builds to pro-shops like yours?”
Kit: “Exploding is maybe a strong word but it’s growing very quickly. You’ll get specialists like Lunaz catering to the wealthy with specific builds, and then you’ll get people like us catering to everyone and everything else! The business needs to have some repeatability to be sustainable. There’s no point spending all that time on a Golf conversion if we’re not going to do it again. The issue with this has been that the technology has moved so fast that so much is out of date within a year. Repeatable products allow us to have the cash flow to play with fun new projects! We’re also seeing a boom of DIYers, garage conversionists. To be honest, I’m seriously concerned about this. Some Youtubers have created the idea that conversions are easy. So people spend a large chunk of cash giving it a go and realise they have no idea, or how dangerous it can be. But they’ve sunk too much cash into it by then so they keep going. I have a fun idea to create a little conversion community (The eDub Club). A subscription service that gives access to parts, training and services but more importantly, telephone support. So you get an answer to a question before just plowing in with your screwdriver!”
Jesper: “I definitely have to agree on this one. As you know I bought an old Volvo 240 with an idea of converting it, but lucky for me I did my due diligence and examined all that had to be done and discovered that it would cost a fortune, especially in approvals, so I dropped out before spending a lot of cash on parts. I just fixed the car up as any other classic. Speaking of classics: You have a few videos with a Porsche build. You don’t mention that in the update, is it the NDA thing?”
Kit: “We’ve finished our conversion aspect on the Porsche. It’s having the finishing touches put to it now and we’re ready to do another 911 as soon as the phone rings! (The NDA is something else…)”
Jesper: “Great idea with the Vespa project, producing a real series to order! Any plans for doing maybe real motorcycles? Cars? I mean, the Golf Mk2 would be a hot one you could sell a lot of. You would just have to go to Germany very soon and buy up the rest!”
Kit: “The Golf has been done to a level that it will be repeatable. It’s a very tidy build and very popular. A simple reel on instagram is currently at 22.6k views (a little up form my 500 average). We will launch as a product very soon.”
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