Well the climate has changed since you were last here, friend: temps in that season routinely in the 90s–100s.
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While I admit that would look cool, don’t Nixie tubes suck power like nobody’s business?
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Yeah, we were tougher back in the stone age.
I’m more like, yikes are those all car batteries?
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Well, they are batteries and they are in a car, so technically… not your usual type of car battery, though.
Man, I’ve always fancied a Metropolitan since I saw one in mint condition in London in 1986 or so.
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Someone is already making a bolt-in setup that replaces the big six in old Jags.
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I think there is going to be quite a bit of this, once EV drivelines start appearing on the shelf. More people will be driving around in restored or recreated bodies, with electrics under the hood. And it should be fairly cheap as well, once mass production cuts in. Electric stuff is cheap.
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You’ve just solved half of the HVAC equation.
You were saying?
I’d say the design influences are pretty similar 
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NB somebody pointed out to me that in the originals, those little windscreens are WWI surplus aircraft windscreens. They still had A.V. Roe embossed on the mounting hardware.
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ISTR Metropolitans already had a reputation for having the back end unstick in turns. All the extra weight back there would NOT improve that tendency.
Well, they require high voltage, that’s for sure, but I don’t know that they pull a lot of watts. @nixiebunny would know. High voltage is readily available in most EVs and hybrids these days but obviously you want to save your amps for motive power.
If they do suck watts, though, there’s always Lixies or Numitrons!
My introduction to the Nash Metropolitan was the Stanard [sic] Cab in this video by Stan Ridgway:
During the summer of '86, my family and I were visiting California, and due to good timing my dad & I caught Stan Ridgway’s show at the Roxy*. Someone (presumably Stan?) parked the Stanard Cab right out front. When we got back to the hotel, I looked out the balcony just in time to see the Stanard Cab go back up Sunset.
*(The opening band was a group called Dream 6; some months later they turned up on MTV but had changed their name to Concrete Blonde)
A few months ago I Googled the Stanard Cab and found that it had been put up for sale (and, apparently, never actually belonged to Stan):
http://www.midwinter.com/beyond/news/stanardcab.html
Nixie tubes use under a half a watt apiece. Not noticeable when you’ve got 25 kW available to run your electric motor.
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…“had the back end unstick in curves.”
A relative had one of these little yellow and white lemons and drove it on East Tennessee roads with more curves than a Kardashian. Never could figure out why the car would take off and leave the entire rear axle on the ground. She was in hock to shade tree mechanics for years.
Leave that critter in Oregon for an overpaid fool to purchase. You.Have.Been.Warned.
Well, in my experience weight placement and distribution can help or hinder… if you balance the weight to be slightly heavier between the drive wheels, and put it all extremely low in the vehicle, as in a Prius, you will stick to the road like glue. If you are rear-wheel drive and have most of the weight in the rear, as in a Porsche 911, a skilled and/or maniacal driver can have unbelievable amounts of screaming tire smoking fishtailing fun. If you balance the weight nearly perfectly, as in a Porsche 914, the car will stick to the road until it suddenly doesn’t, at which point it will go into an uncontrollable flat spin which is not fun.
As I said before, this looks like an extremely high quality conversion, probably including upgraded suspension components. I think you’d have to drive it to know for sure how it would compare to a stock nash.
It would be great if this does become more common, but I don’t see it happening in really substantial numbers any time soon. For a long time I was very seriously researching converting my 1960 Ford to electric, and had discussions with a couple different conversion shops about the options. One of the folks I met with was one of the subjects of the “Who killed the electric car?” documentary. In the end credits he drove his converted classic Porsche from LA to Palm Springs, in a supposedly triumphant, uplifting ending. When I went out to his workshop I was dismayed to find that the car was partially disassembled for major maintenance work, and he used a gas car as his daily driver. As we talked money it became clear that doing a quality job of converting my car would end up being more expensive than buying a brand new Nissan Leaf, and wouldn’t have the same range.
“Off-the-shelf” conversion kits do exist for a few models of cars, such as old VW bugs. But I don’t think that there will ever be enough demand to drive down the cost all that much through economys of scale. There are fewer classic cars available for potential conversion every year, and there’s just no getting around the fact that it’s a very labor intensive process, even if you had something that could be called a “plug and play” kit.
Used Nissan Leafs are dirt cheap these days. Maybe the better, easier strategy is to market body kits for those to dress up a used leaf chassis and drivetrain as a whole different style of car. I’m surprised I haven’t seen more of that, actually.
In my own case, I ended up just converting my old car to run on propane. A much cheaper, easier conversion that is at least somewhat more environmentally friendly than gasoline and solved the problem of my wife not liking how my car smelled.
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Don’t convert an air-cooled VW to EV unless you are going to throw away the pan, suspension and drive train and scratch build everything but the outer body panels, trust me on this.
However, I’m pretty sure the two vehicles that are cost effective to convert with off-the-shelf kits are the VW Rabbit and the Chevy S10. Or at least that was true at one time.
Very true. Although from the picture alone, you can determine that it is likely to have the same “stately” turning radius. (The fenders cover the front wheels, limiting the amount that the front wheels turn)
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