[Tobes]

Hi!

Been driving a '99 chevy sedan (gas powered) since college and have been saving up for someday get a used EV or do a conversion myself. Right now my dream EV would be a 97-98 factory built chevy s10, but they are so hard to find! If anyone knows of one that is willing to be sold, let me know!

I have worked on electric golf carts and built a couple electric go carts (Power Racing Series), but I am ready for someday get an actual electric vehicle. I have been following the EV news for a while and have rooting for Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, and Lordstown for a while, but I am really hoping that the legacy US auto manufactures start producing some good EVs. I love talking about EVs in the news. Things have been very exciting these last few years!

- Tobes

 

[80698]

Welcome! Always good to see new members here.

As much as conversion may sound like a great option right now, I really must urge you to look very carefully before you jump into that.

It is VERY expensive, time consuming, will cause days of headaches trying to work out the cause of mystery faults and will be less reliable with no dealer support, and pushing an old vehicle to work with hardware it was never designed to work with. That's before we consider that you'll also probably lose out on features like DC Rapid charging too making it less practical especially if it was your main car.

That's not to try and ruin your dreams or anything. Just many people come here with the hope to make a conversion and the majority really don't realise just how hard or expensive it is to make your own EV.

Likewise, your big manufacturers are similar. Some are being dragged kicking and screaming into the age of plug-in vehicles. Some are doing a great job, but with others it really shows that they aren't taking it seriously and make some truly awful cars. It's why Tesla today is still such a huge name in the EV world, despite struggling in other areas compared to the longstanding manufacturers when it comes to build quality, and quality control during production.

 

[Tobes]

I agree that conversions are a lot of time and work and are harder to justify especially with used leafs/sparks/volts becoming cheaper. I really would a small electric truck, so a factory built 97-98 chevy s10 would be amazing (been searching for one!)

On your last statement about Tesla and quality, I agree that when reading the news and seeing repeated articles about Tesla build quality has been a bit discouraging. However, after reading the following article, it seems with their new plant they are producing cars with pretty good quality. Perhaps building cars in a facility built specifically for Tesla vehicle production has helped the build quality and we will see this repeated in Giga Berlin and Giga Texas? What do you think?

Tesla's made-in-China cars lead market in quality while US-made Tesla cars score lowest - Electrek.