Converting a 411 to Electric

[Claude]

My wife is pressuring me to do something about the 411-S1 that has been sitting in the garage since I gave up trying to get it through NZ's draconian import inspection regime adopted two years before I quit in 2004. Since then I has sat unregistered, un-VIN'd, and seeing its brakes lock up from lack of use. I probably should just sell it.

I had the engine rebuilt, yet on quick drives up the road after a battery charge, it overheats in about 1/2 km. I had the transmission rebuilt, yet the specialist shop, in proposing to make it a lock-up type obviously did something wrong, that four subsequent attempts failed to correct. I finally bought a transmission from America where they are cheap as chips, but never got around to installing it (a day or two of miserable work, I am told). So the car sits, while I focus on other things and my wife complains.

As I read how petrol cars are doomed, I wonder what will happen to our collectibles as their fuel becomes difficult to source, and the driving of a petrol-guzzling beast moves into the same camp as flying the Confederate battle flag on the radio antenna while driving through the streets of San Francisco.

Unlike the Bristol-6 cars, where removing the engine would be sacrilege, the foreign lump in the Bristol-8 cars has no such ethnic purity about it. It's just a dumb old Chrysler that Tony picked up after a chance conversation at a trade show. It survives mostly because it is the favoured block of tattooed petrol heads reliving their fantasies of Smokey and the Bandit.

I have been following the electric motor evolution carefully, and especially enjoy having converted the crank on my Italian 3-speed bicycle to a Bafang BBS 300W kit motor that flattens the hills and makes bicycling great again.

The electric motor industry is improving every month, and I wonder what would happen if our friends at Fraser Nash Research would introduce a retrofit for the Bristol-8. The remarkable thing about electrification is how little it costs, with the batteries being more expensive than the motor and controller. It is clean, never needs an oil change, and has almost no moving parts.

So, let me try a survey.

1. At what price would you say to Bristol/Fraser-Nash that you would submit your car for a conversion to full electric?
2. In other words, how much would you pay for the kit (you do the work yourself) or how much would you pay for them to do the work?
3. How many miles would you need your car to go on a single charge? This is important since more miles=bigger battery

This is a serious question. If Bristol saw that it could have a potential buying group (think crowd-sourcing), even if it did it at cost as a gesture of loyalty to its fan base, the global PR, properly managed, could do a lot for them.