Chatsworth Garage Learns to Go Electric

In his Chatsworth auto restoration shop, Jonathan Ward stands near a Ferrari 250 GTE. 

Built by the Italian car company from 1952 to 1964, Ward called the car the prettiest model of the Ferrari four-seaters. Soon this 1963 GTE will be converted into an electric vehicle – one of five that Ward’s company, Icon, will be making.

“It’s fun because if we approach it the right way and we delay the EV components until the last possible second, after the body design and all that has already been executed, that gives us a far better chance of staying as contemporary as possible with the tech part of it,” Ward said, as he stood by the dust-covered car kept in a corner of his shop.

In another part of the shop stands a 1949 Mercury Coupe, also an electric conversion. This car is undergoing final inspection and tweaks to the software before Icon hands it over to the owner, who lives in Georgia.

The car is powered by a back-to-back dual transmission-less motor system that gets its power from Tesla battery packs positioned in the former gas tank, over the rear axle and the upfront engine bay. The Merc is capable of an estimated 150- to 200-mile range and takes only 90 minutes to fully charge. It comes with dual chargers – one hidden behind the front license plate and the other in the gas tank filler.

Converting the Merc to an electric vehicle was fun but Ward admitted to being cautious so as not to alienate the traditional hot rodder who might see the car. Ward said the ’49 Merc became the iconic hot rod car in Southern California after James Dean drove one in the movie “Rebel Without a Cause.” 

“So a lot of the engine bay packaging design decisions that were made were done to keep that traditional audience engaged,” Ward said. 

The Merc is the third finished electric conversion by Icon. The first was a Volkswagen Thing completed in 2017 followed by a Fiat Giardiniera, completed the following year.

An EV conversion is not as simple as pulling the internal combustion engine and replacing it with a sleek new electric motor. It often involves tradeoffs between the original equipment and new technology.

“What level of compromise are you going to tolerate?” Ward asked. “Is it range, is it safety, is it performance, is it packaging? Rudimentary solutions versus really involving the whole chassis?” 

The ’49 Merc was the first car where Ward and his team of engineers, fabricators and other skilled tradesmen made some “stupid but ambitious” targets. They wanted the car to be far more complex, robust, safer and capable than what was coming out of the general retrofit EV market.

“Therefore, it became a huge time suck,” Ward added. “We briefly delivered it and then took it right back because there was this Gen 7 controller that could suddenly charge quicker, monitor more systems and offer more stopgap safety and insurance. The client, who is kind of a geek like me, said that we should update to that because it has a lot more capabilities.”

These electric conversions were done for customers that Icon has made vehicles for in the past, and that Ward said he felt comfortable telling them that he didn’t know about pricing or even providing a fixed content list because the technology is moving so quickly.

“We’ve learned in the EV world whenever you are dealing with the technical generations, not just software but hardware and batteries to the least extent, but like controllers, cooling networks, power steering, AC solutions, etc. are moving at a rate at which we are not traditionally accustomed to in transportation design,” Ward said.

Still, because he felt the right resources are now available, Ward is making a big push at Icon to electrify the production range of vehicles that the company produces. That would include the FJ, BR and TR lines based on the classic first generation Toyota Land Cruiser, the early Ford Broncos and the 1947 to 1953 Chevrolet pickups.

“We are going to start that in (the first quarter of next year) in engineering,” he added.

The crew at Icon finishes about three dozen cars a year. The typical combustion engine vehicles can take 12 to 48 months to finish. The first two electric vehicle conversions took between a year and a half to two years, Ward said, while the Merc took about three and half years. 

– Mark R. Madler