Rebuilding A Tesla With A Camaro Engine

Uh my name is Rich and I run a youtube channel called Rich Rebuilds .

And uh on that youtube channel , we just make a lot of really weird fun stuff .

So we start out with mostly doing E V s .

We switch to gas and now we do both gas and E V s and just have a really funny time .

It's funny because once you build a repair a Tesla , you kind of fix it and you go from there , there's no real upgrades for it .

Uh So many things are electronically controlled .

It doesn't make it as fun for the hot rodders out there .

So I said to myself , you know , what , how do we mix the two things ?

How do we have , you know , a , a really good looking car and combining it with the tune of a , of , of a classic V eight engine .

So we decided just to combine the two , a lot of people think that , oh , you took a brand new Tesla and toured a park .

It's like , no , no , it wasn't a flood and Tesla won't sell you batteries and motors to repair it .

So I said , you know what if Tesla won't then uh Jennifer Motors will .

So it was a Camaro S s that was completely destroyed and the engine was available and uh decided to put it in the Tesla .

For me , it's one of those things where it has to do with recycling .

So they were both just like rat cars sitting in a field and I said , why have them both just sitting there , why not combine the two and make something that actually runs and functions ?

So I spent the first few months actually stripping it down , taking out all the interior components , pressure , washing everything and just getting all of like the stench and like the sewage out of the car .

So I took both motors out .

Both motors were toast .

You ready ?

Water , man .

There's tons of water in there .

Uh The battery pack was pretty much toast because under water for so long , you know , um , anything short of aluminum was shipped out of the car .

So I think a lot of measuring and prep was the hardest part , making sure the engine sits straight and true in the car because don't forget , not only do you have to have , make sure the engine sits well in the car , but there's also a transmission that adds another few feet and there's also a really long drive shaft that spins thousands upon thousands of R PM that are literally sitting right between your legs that has to be straight as well .

Like a lot of different angles and things had to be straight in order for the car to even roll down the road , believe it or not , it almost makes sense that the V eight fits so well .

Once you take out the front motor , there's so much room in there and the L S3 is actually so narrow , it actually fit in there pretty well .

So what we noticed was that when we brought the car to Sima , if we had the hood open , everyone would just walk by it because the install was so clean .

It was only until they saw the Tesla logo that everyone just kind of a rubberneck stopped and went towards the car .

The exhaust fabrication process was interesting .

Um because battery pack for a Tesla model last weighs about , I would say between 11 and £1200 .

So because the old battery was , you know , about four inches thick and so heavy and it tucked in .

So underneath the car once he removed did .

And we made the exhaust system , we decided to go with oval tubing because when you go with oval tubing , kind of like NAS cars use , you actually save a lot of space going oval versus completely circular .

So if you notice we have a side exit exhaust system , most cars have a rear exit exhaust where it actually comes right under the rear bumper .

We couldn't do that because the independent rear suspension was so large , the exhaust actually couldn't go past it .

So we just terminated the exhaust system right to the sides right before the , the rear wheels .

Yeah , one of the biggest challenges was uh the fabrication of the transmission tunnel , you know , in a Tesla , it's one of the few cars that are made , it has a completely flat floor .

You know , most cars nowadays that are rear wheel drive , there's a tunnel going from the front all the way to the back .

This one didn't have that .

So we had to make our own and it was , it was definitely challenging .

Uh So we have , we have a great fabricator , Joshua that actually was able to cut the car in half down the middle and actually build a transmission tunnel .

One of the other difficult issues we went through with this car was the wiring so we can completely stripped the car down to the bare frame .

It was just literally just a shell and we had to rewire the entire car all over again .

And we actually removed about 50 to 60% of the car's entire wiring on its like the battery pack is not there .

That's one set of wiring , high voltage cables .

Uh There was uh wiring to the rear motors , the front motors , those are both gone .

You know , we save some a significant amount of weight going from the older lithium powered battery pack to the uh to the internal combustion engine .

The , the car still has the touch screen .

Uh uh it still has the instrument cluster and all the functions work , the navigation works .

The Bluetooth works .

So when you stood in the car , you could , you know , push buttons and play with different functions of the vehicle and it , it does work .

I am very satisfied with how it runs .

Yeah , we still need to do some fine tuning to it .

But at the end of the day when you sit in it and you drive it , you , I , you almost forget that it's a Tesla .

Like , you're just thinking that you're driving like a regular , you know , powerful V eight engine car and it's , it's , it's really weird because if you don't think about it , you're like , ok , this is pretty cool as a manual I'm doing my thing .

But you really have to take a step back and say to yourself , this car never had any of this .