Rich Rebuilds Built a V8 Tesla

So what was the motivation to build this VA Tesla? That's a good question. So I... Let's pull up a video of Rich's YouTube channel. Tesla got a... As I was building different Teslas over the years, a lot of the... I guess the fanboys got to me after a while. I mean, have you been around like Tesla fanatics, like ultra fanatics that are just like... I try to avoid all fanatics. Yes. In every single area of the world. Yes, every genre. Yes. So ever, yes. They're too crazy. It's a bit much. So what started happening over time was Tesla kind of pulled the reins in on ordering parts for cars. If I want to order like a battery or a motor, a battery, a motor, a charger, I can't do those things. Like those are restricted parts. You can't do that. So what that tells me is that the product that I bought, the product I spent all this money on, I can't... I don't really own it. Because they're in control of the parts for it. Like an iPhone. Correct. Yes, exactly like an iPhone. So I said to myself, you know what? That's a funny clip. That's what actually ran out of gas there. Go figure. I ran out of gas. And that's actually an electric Tesla bringing me gas. That's a different story. But what ended up happening was it... Over time, it got worse and worse. Over time, it's like, well, what's the VIN number to this car? Oh, we don't believe in selling you these parts. This isn't going to work. That car is a salvage car. You can't do it. I said to myself, you know what? What can I do to this vehicle to make it so that I can get parts easy and it's easy to service and I have full control over it? I said, you know what? I'm a Chevy fanboy. I'm going to throw an LS in there. Throwing an LS in there, that allows me to get parts literally off the shelf from AutoZone. For Tesla, if my Tesla break, let's just say you're in your plaid right now, right? And you break down the side of the road. And the tow truck driver says, what do you remember to bring you? You're going to say AutoZone or advanced auto parts or pet boys? No. There isn't a single part sold for those cars there. If I break down the V8 Tesla, you pull me anywhere. I could get pistons, rods, you name it, lifters, valves for that car, literally anywhere. And I have full control over it. How did you make the V8 engine interface with the Tesla dashboard? That's a great question. So all cars have what's known as an accessory mode, right? The drive rails aren't on and the engine isn't on, but the accessories are on. You're going to a car that the screen turns on, but the engine isn't on. So the Tesla effectively believes it's an accessory mode right now. All the windows work, the headlights work, the turn signals work, everything works. It's just that the last button to turn on the drive rails and actually start the car, that's no longer there. And that's where the V8 engine takes over. So imagine you have your, I don't know, you have your Porsche, your GT3. You get in that car, you sit in it right now and you do everything but turn the engine over. All the accessories work. The lights work, the radio works, everything works except for that last phase to turn the fuel pump on, set the spark plugs on to turn the engine over. So the Tesla just thinks it's on an idle, but not ready to drive. Really? Yeah. And how did you rig that? So the V8, so basically any Tesla will do that. You pull a Tesla out of a junkyard, you could get in it, sit in it, make sure it's getting power and you could at least get to that step. Now the way the V8 takes over is, V8s are probably the, it's the dumbest engine alive. You give it a battery to start it over and you give it fuel, it's going to run. So there's a separate control system for the engine itself. So we have a Haltech system that communicates with that. So there's actually two separate systems that control the car. And if one of those systems dies, the car will still function. If the Tesla screen dies all of a sudden and Tesla says, you know what, I had enough of this, that V8, it'll still turn on and I could still go over where I want. You just want to have a speedometer and you want to have a fuel gauge. Well actually I will because the separate system, the Haltech system controls the gas engine still. So there's two independent systems that work separate of each other. So the separate system, what kind of dashboard are you looking at? Are you looking at the same dashboard that a regular Tesla has? Same. So that speedometer still works too because it goes by the wheel speed sensors. That speedometer still works. The navigation works. The Bluetooth works. The car works. Really? So if you're in that car right now, besides the six-speed shifter, you wouldn't be able to tell anything special about it. So you have a six-speed manual in there? Six-speed manual shifter. You see it right there in that video right there to the... Back it up a little bit. You call it Iced Tea. Iced Tea, yeah. Eternal combustion engine tea. I like it. So there's a shifter right in the middle and it's a six-speed. It's sequentially shifted. You tap it forward and tap it back to go up and down. Oh, okay. That's it right there. Like a race car. That's it right there, yep. What is that second gear to the left of it? That's to engage reverse. Oh. So you pull back to go in reverse. Wow. Yeah. So that's the only way you could tell. I mean, everything else works on the screen. Like the door indicator buttons work. The sunroof works. Literally everything works in that car. How hard was this to do? It took a team of us. We have Joshua, our fabricator. We had to literally cut the car in half. Really? To form the transmission tunnel. Because Tesla's are one of the few cars which are great because they were designed as EVs only. Some companies will take a gas car and then throw an electric drive train in it and call it a day. Tesla's were designed from the ground up to be electric vehicles. Well, the Model S was. So the floor is completely flat. If for rear wheel drive cars, you have a drive shaft that goes from the front to the back. Well, we couldn't put that there because the floor is flat. We have to cut the car in half, install the engine, and then build a transmission tunnel over that drive shaft from the front all the way back. Also a transmission tunnel as well. Because the transmission, that sticks out like a couple feet. So this is all fabricated? All fabrication. All fabricated. I mean, countless hours have gone into that. How long from the time you had this idea to the actual starting and driving? About two years. Wow. That's such a crazy commitment. You know how it is. The planning stages are like, hmm, yeah, I'm going to do this. Right. Yeah, I'm going to do it. I should do it. How much is that? Nah, I'm not going to do it. I was contemplating for a while and then I said, you know what? I got to commit to this. I'm going to start doing this. I hooked up with Joshua. He's like, hey, listen. He actually, fun fact. So he was watching one of the videos and he's just like, hey, like, you know, if you need help with fabrication stuff, let me know. He used to build like NASCAR's. Like two chassis. Okay. He says, I could do stuff. Never seen his work before. I took that V8 Tesla, dropped it off at his house, and I said, I trust you on this one. And then that was it. The rest was history. So we would go there, shoot video. The first start video was there and we just worked on it until the end and then it's running and driving. So when you cut it in half, do you have to do something to ensure the rigidity of the structure? Yeah, there's bracing and reinforcements all over the car. So is it much heavier than the original car? It's about 1200 pounds lighter than the original car. Really? Yes. Because the electric engine and the battery is missing? If you think about it, the average battery weight of a Tesla is well over a thousand pounds, 1100 pounds in some cases. That makes sense. So the rear motor, that rear motor subframe that was like 350 pounds, 400 pounds, then there's a front motor as well. So the front motor, after moving all that weight, putting an engine in a transmission, an LS, one of the lightest engines they make with the drivetrain, that car went from 4,975 pounds to like 3,300 pounds. The car weighs next to nothing now. Wow. Comparably speaking. 3,000 pounds for a sedan is really light. It's very light. And that has the full interior, the seats, it has everything in there. That's like sports car light. Yeah. It's a light car. You'd be amazed at how much you could remove a shot. That's the tunnel right there. That's all the bracing of the tunnel. So we had to build that. So that large, that was the first start. That was really fun. We had to build that tunnel, all the bracing in it, so it wouldn't fall apart. So all that structural tubing going across it to the car is in pancake itself. And that's the work. Now when you drive this thing, obviously it wasn't designed to have an engine in the front and the transmission tunnel and all that. That was a fake yoke. We were going to put a yoke in it as a joke. We ended up not doing that because it's a waste of time. I don't like the yoke. No. I don't like it as a steering choice. It just sucks when you're trying to park and pull into places. How much did it affect the way the car handles? The car handles great. We took it on a racetrack. So eBay Motors actually were sponsored by them. They brought us out to Sonoma Raceway and we were just doing donuts and burnouts around their circle track. The car, you know what it feels like? It feels almost like a, what's a four door muscle car? A modern muscle car. A Charger. Charger. Yeah. A Cadillac CTSV. It's more like a Cadillac CTSV. Wow. And it's just, it's light, it's fun. It'll do a burnout. I was thinking I was going like 30 miles an hour, stomped on it, rolling burnout until like almost a hundred. The thing is ridiculously fun. Really? Yeah. It's a really fun car. But it's, that's the thing. The biggest debate was, Rich, why are you doing this? Because the finished product is slower than a normal Tesla. Right? I'm like, that's fair enough. Zero to 60 is not as fast. It's rear wheel drive only now. It'll spin the tires until a hundred. No problem. It's, there's no autopilot. That doesn't work anymore. But I'll tell you right now, I took that car to a show. Worked it next to a Plaid. The fastest and most amazing car built right now. People didn't even know it was a Plaid next to me. People went crazy over that car. And that's why it was built. Because of the novelty. Because of the novelty. It's, it's, listen, that's the, probably the only one that's going to get built. There's no sense in making a second one because let's be real, the car was expensive to make and it isn't as fast as a regular Tesla. It's just to show what you can do when you put your mind to it. And I'll tell you man, I've had offers to buy that car for ridiculous amounts of money just because of what it is. You can work on it. You can modify it yourself. And it's the spirit of car enthusiasm. Are you going to sell it? Never. Never. Never. You just said never. I have a big problem, Joe. I keep, every car I build, I keep. Every car that's, that represents a memory for me, whether it's friends coming together for a common cause, building something, having all those memories, I never sell them. Really? So the V8 Telsa is one of them because I could see myself already, that car has made so many memories for, as friends. If I sell that car and I see some knucklehead driving it down the street, I'll be like, that's my car. Right. I want that. Why are you having fun in that? Especially the amount of time involved in thinking. That one I get. Right. I get. About the engineering behind it because what's it worth to someone? 100, 150? Right. 200? I mean no one's going to pay 200 for it. Let's just say 150 for that car. That's cool, but now what? I don't have my car back. Right. And now you're going to make something else anyway. Right. True. The LS, what is the stock LS out of the box? Horsepower? I think about 4, 425 or something like that. With a 3,000 pound car, that's probably great. It's really fun. I think we did a long tube headers, a few other modifications to it. I think it's about 470 or so right now and then we're actually putting a supercharger on it and then the few months. That's going back to SEMA. But yeah, that's the thing. That's why I enjoy about it. You're a plaid right now. Let's just say you get bored of the power. But what do you do to it? As a car enthusiast, you're Porsche or GT3 RS, you could do a million different things to it. It's Chartworx. It's been modified already. Your old muscle cars, you could improve the handling, the braking, the power, whatever you want. If you're in a regular Tesla, as an enthusiast, I actually got very bored of mine because the way you get it is the way it's going to stay unless you buy a plaid or you get on your knees and bag a Elon to release a software update to give you 30 more horsepower. Well there's a company called Unplugged. Do you know about them? Of course. Unplugged Performance, Ben. I know them very well. They will take a Tesla and they will jazz it up and put wider tires and fender flares and a rear spoiler and they get crazy. Which is cool, but I want more power. When I step my foot down, I want my eyes to go in the back of my head. In a regular Tesla, you could add a little suspension stuff you want to feel great around corners, but I want that power. I want one with a stop light. I see every one of your mirror. With the V8 Tesla, granted, no. It's nothing crazy now. It's fun to drive, but you know what the power of a fully built LS engine is. There's no limit. There's no limit. You can keep going. You can keep going. The plaid makes about, you're probably putting out maybe 1,100 horsepower now on your plaid, I think. 1,200. Something like that, which is hilarious. Which is insane. The V8 Tesla, you could ... Greg, you only put in the power of the rear wheels, but you could have 1,500, 2,000, you name it. Really? LS engine, yeah. It's infinite power. 3,000 horsepower if you want. What? What do you have to do to do that? You have to redesign the whole engine. Jesus. You have to build the whole thing, but yeah. You can get 3,000 horsepower out of an LS engine? Out of a V8 engine? Of course you can, yeah. Oh my God. I had no idea. Forge block, yeah. You have to do literally everything, but yeah. It's probably going to blow up in your face. Absolutely. It's a ticking time bomb, but it's fun until it blows up. But that's just for the car modification. Yes. You drive it, you blow it up, you rebuild it, and then you do it all over again.