Everrati’s electric Porsche 911 restomod is the true soul of driving
In the sportscar world, there is much discussion about retaining the “purity” of the sputtering, underperforming gas-guzzling engines of yesteryear. After a drive in Everrati’s Porsche 911 restomod, you’ll be ready to embrace the present and see just how much the drive experience can improve with modern technology.
There has been a lot of discussion about “purity” of the driving experience related to EVs. Some decry the “numb” feeling of the consumer-focused EVs they’ve driven, and think that this is indicative of some wider impossibility to provide an engaging drive experience in an electric vehicle.
But of course, when you compare a modern jellybean SUV, regardless of powertrain, with a purpose-built sportscar, there are going to be some differences in drive dynamics that aren’t flattering to the SUVs.
So lets make that comparison a little more fair. Let’s take an actual sportscar, a Porsche 911 (964) RSR, updated to the present day with an electric powertrain, and see just how much that “purity” in drive experience can be carried over with intentional effort, rather than kowtowing to perceptions of current market trends.
For some background on myself, I started driving EVs with the original Mini E, which was merely a retrofit vehicle with the back seats replaced by a giant stack of batteries. It was a bit of a kludge, but I still fell in love with it largely due to the strengths of electric propulsion.
I then went on to buy an original Tesla Roadster, one of the few true sportscars out there that runs on electricity, so I’ve got more experience than most in small electric two-seaters.
There are certainly a lot of high-performance EVs these days, but most of them are hefty (4,000-5,000 lbs or more), 4-5 seaters with all-wheel drive (my toxic trait is that as far as I’m concerned, if it isn’t rear wheel drive, it isn’t really a sportscar).
So imagine my enthusiasm when I was offered a drive in a custom-built electric Porsche 911 (as long as Porsche refuses to make one itself…).
So, I headed down to Crystal Cove in Newport Beach, California, to meet Everrati CEO Justin Lunny and take this thing for a spin, to see what this real electric sportscar can do – and lets just say there might be a new entry on my lottery ticket shopping list.
Everrati is a UK-based company that does electric restomods of several vehicles, including the Porsche 911, Mercedes-Benz W113 Pagoda, Land Rover Series IIA and Ford GT40.
The company has completed 20 cars so far, with Porsche 911s being the most popular vehicle to convert.
I caught Lunny charging the Porsche as I pulled up, at a 50kW charging station. It has two charging inlets – one in the rear, under the trunk, which does DC or AC charging, and one in the front, using the 911’s original fuel door, which only does AC charging. The car is capable of 70kW charge rates, and while we don’t know what its charge curve looks like, that should mean 30-45 mins for a 10-80% charge.
The vehicle I drove is a 911 (964) RSR, created by Everrati as a commission, as many of its vehicles are. The vehicle still has a few finishing touches that need to be put on it, but otherwise was mostly complete. As a commission, the buyer was able to customize various aspects of the vehicle (including, for example, charge port location).
The interior of the vehicle is nicely finished, with everything redone from the original, but still in retro style. Gauges, knobs and switches are all in a similar style to the original, though a small single-DIN CarPlay headunit betrays the modernization under the hood.
It’s a two-seater, with some room behind the seats for some bags, but no seatbelts or room for people due to the rollbar. And the seats are heavily bolstered, locking you into position for when you whip it through corners. This is a real sportscar, it’s not just masquerading as one.
On a weekday on public roads, there wasn’t much opportunity to really open up the car or get in too much trouble, but the California weather and scenery were exactly what you’d expect. Our drive went up and down PCH and through some canyons, with a quick dip onto the freeway.
The amount of trouble we could get into was also limited by the car’s excellent handling. With a light weight and wide tires (295s on the rear, 30mm wider than the originals), the car felt extremely planted wherever we took it.
Everrati says that it’s important to maintain the weight of every vehicle it releases, and that it tries to ensure that its restomods don’t come out heavier than the original vehicle. It says this restomod is about 40lbs lighter than a 964 turbo (though that would make it heavier than the original RSR, which had significant weight-savings applied).
Despite the addition of a chunky 62kWh battery pack (range ~200 miles), Everrati says it was able to keep weight down by replacing several body panels with carbon fiber, in cooperation with Aria group, a contract manufacturer in Irvine, CA. Aria group works with Singer, the highly regarded Porsche restomodder – and is also helping TELO produce its tiny electric truck.
Everrati even went to the effort of ensuring weight distribution is similar to the original 911.
Famously, 911s are one of few cars designed with a rear-mounted engine, whose weight hangs behind the rear axle. From an engineering perspective, this is simply the wrong way to design a car – you want to reduce the car’s moment of inertia, which means bringing any heavy components as far inboard as possible.
Everrati did bring the motor slightly inboard of where the 911’s engine is, but it’s still placed behind the rear axle, maintaining the 911’s historically weird handling. And 70% of the car’s batteries are in the rear, to keep it rear-heavy.
In our drive test, the handling certainly didn’t feel heavy and felt extremely well-balanced, so we think Everrati did a good job here.
Steering is something else that Porsche has always been praised for. Everrati tried to maintain the steering feel of the original, with only light power assist leading to a heavy steering feel.
This was welcome to me, as my Roadster has manual steering, with no power assist at all. So I’m used to having to crank a small wheel around. The steering had a little bit of “play” in the wheel, which I imagine owes to its early 90s heritage (though still much tighter than the classic Bronco restomod I just drove prior), but otherwise felt exactly how I wanted it to – a relatively quick steering ratio with plenty of feeling transmitted to the driver.
But it has also managed to roughly double the horsepower from the original Porsche it was based on. Everrati says its restomod can produce about 500 horsepower, compared to the ~300 horsepower of even the racing version of the 964 911.
As is the case with Everrati’s vehicles, its drive software was customized for the customer in question. The customer asked for a drive experience that closely mirrored the original Porsche it was based on, so it wasn’t as “punchy” as some of today’s most powerful EVs, like Tesla’s Plaid Model S or the Turbo edition of Porsche’s Taycan and Macan EVs.
I liked this, myself, as I do think that we’ve gotten a little too punchy these days and lost the linearity I appreciate out of the throttle pedals in the Roadster and original RWD Model 3.
It also had virtually no off-throttle regen, instead placing the regenerative braking on the pedal. This is a sticking point for me, as I prefer one-pedal driving with strong off-throttle regen like many longtime EV drivers who have experienced it, so I’m glad that Everrati said it could offer something like that for customers who request it.
Speaking of brakes, the brake pedal, to me, felt a little soft. This could have been due to the tuning of the regenerative braking system, and also could surely be modified to an owner’s desires. I never did any particularly hard braking events that would have needed to engage the car’s friction brakes, but I just would have liked a little touchier brake pedal.
We also had a quick stop for a shake at the nearby Crystal Cove Shake Shack, and impressed some onlookers from the surrounding all-too-wealthy area. We caught several passers-by checking the car out, and they were quite surprised to learn that the classic Porsche they were looking at (otherwise not too rare of a sight in “New Porsche Beach”…) was electric.
Overall, this restomod is better put together than any I’ve seen or felt, and drove fantastically well.
I am often disappointed in some way by the EVs that I test drive, because they’re just not as fun to drive as the EVs that I’ve spent all my time in (Mini E, Tesla Roadster and Model 3). There’s often something missing, or something different, which may or may not have a good reason for being how it is, but at the end of the day it just makes the car less appealing to me than the EVs that I really love.
Not so with the Everrati. While I’d tune a couple things differently myself, this thing felt great. Just absolutely top tier. I just had to keep interrupting myself while talking to Lunny during my test drive, telling him how great this car felt. Just fantastic.
And that leads us back to the beginning – whether an EV can offer a “pure” driving experience. While taking this thing up and down PCH, through canyons, on a perfect Southern California day, without any of the rumbling, noise, or delayed shifting of gears needed from a traditional ICE engine.
There’s nothing to get between you and driving, and all the sensory experiences that motion entails. The car did what I wanted, when I wanted, and felt and looked great doing it. That sounds like as pure a driving experience as one can find.
As for the price? Well… “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.” Everrati’s website doesn’t list prices, rather listing it as “POA” (price on application) and having a “let’s talk” button to reach out. The car we drove cost around $450k – on top of the donor car, which can’t have been cheap to begin with.
So, if you happen to have recently found that bitcoin drive you misplaced in 2011, now you know what to do with it.
If you’d like to read more (and see more photos) head on over and take a look at Everrati’s brand book, with lots of pretty pictures of the company’s vehicle projects.
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GM has scrapped plans to build $55 million hydrogen fuel cell factory in Detroit, triggering a tsunami of headlines about the General’s future plans for hydrogen. The reality? GM isn’t scaling back its hydrogen efforts. It’s thinking bigger.
The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.
MARK TWAIN (sort of)
Like the great Sam Clemens, there seems to be plenty of confidence in the greater automotive press that GM’s decision to cancel a $55 millions fuel cell plant on the former Michigan State Fairgrounds site in Detroit. That plant, a JV with Southeast Michigan’s Piston Automotive, would have created ~140 jobs and built compact hydrogen fuel cells for light- and medium-duty vehicles under the Hydrotec brand.
That plan, frankly, was never going to work. It was always a cynical incentive grab and the first fruits of GM’s Hydrotec efforts were so laughably far behind the state of the electric art that the facts themselves blurred the line between satire and reality. Which, of course, didn’t matter – as long as the incentive money (Biden’s Department of Energy awarded GM $30 million in grants for the State Fairgrounds plant) kept flowing.
The new Trump Administration put an end to that flow last week, however, terminating 321 financial awards for clean energy worth $7.56 billion.
“Certainly the decisions of the DOE are an element of that overall climate but not the only driver,” explained GM spokesperson, Stuart Fowle, in a statement. “We want to prioritize the engineering talent and resources and everything we have to continuing to advance EVs given hydrogen is in a different spot.”
That spot is heavy-duty, off-highway, maritime, and data centers.
Bigger trucks, bigger fuel cells
Instead of dying, GM is continuing on the hydrogen fuel cell it’s been on for literal decades – with no plans (publicly, at least) to shutter its Fuel Cell System Manufacturing joint-venture with Honda in Brownstown Township, MI.
That company is not just developing HFCs, they’re out there selling fuel cells today, to extreme-duty, disaster response, and off-highway equipment customers operating far enough off the grid that access to electricity is questionable and to data center developers for whom access to a continuous flow of energy is mission-critical.
Electrek’s Take
Fuel cells like the ones from GM and Honda will continue to seem like a good idea … for about as long as it takes the heavy equipment guys to watch a ZQUIP video.
SOURCE | IMAGES: Detroit News, FreightWaves, Yahoo!Finance.
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EVs are great, and can unlock more transportation convenience with the ease of charging at home. But for apartment-dwellers, this can be a complicated conversation. So a nonprofit called Forth is here to help, through its Charge at Home program.
One of the main benefits of an electric vehicle is in the convenience of owning and charging the car in the place it spends most of its time. Instead of having to go out of your way to fuel it, you just park it at home, in the same place it spends at least 8 hours a day, and you leave the house every day with a full charge.
But this benefit only applies to those with a consistent parking space which they can easily install charging at. When talking about owners who live in apartment buildings, it can sometimes get more complicated.
While certain states have passed “right to charge” laws to give apartment-dwellers a solution for home charging, apartment charging is nevertheless a bit of a patchwork solution so far.
And as a result of this, EV ownership among apartment renters lags behind that of single-family homeowners. It’s clear that apartments are holding back people from buying EVs, and that’s bad – lots of people live in apartments, and the gas those cars use pollutes the air just as much as any other.
Certain areas where EVs have hit a point of critical mass (namely, the large California cities) have pretty good EV ownership among renters, but it could still be better. And residents are clamoring more and more for easy EV charging in apartment communities.
So, Forth, a nonprofit advocating for equitable access to clean transportation, set up a program called Charge at Home, which is meant to connect renters, apartment building owners or other decisionmakers with resources to help install chargers at multifamily properties.
The site lets you select your situation – a resident or a decisionmaker for a new or existing multifamily development – and then gives you access to tools for your specific situation, whether you be a resident and developer.
The site houses links to help design a multifamily project, find electricians, inform you about right to charge laws or available incentives, and provide case studies, among others.
Charge at Home also hosts roundtable webinars periodically, and includes a library of past webinars with the information you need.
There are a lot of considerations for each of these projects, so it can be helpful to have someone with experience to help you go over it all. Personally, when talking to friends about getting an EV, charging considerations are usually the thing that takes up the bulk of the conversation.
So if the toolkits are still too daunting for you, Charge at Home is offering free charging consultations for multifamily developers, owners, property managers and HOAs.
The charging consultations will last through at least April 2026 – but it wouldn’t hurt to get your requests in soon. Forth may still offer consultations afterwards, but it all depends on funding availability (the program was previously funded by the Department of Energy, which has taken a turn). Regardless, the website will remain up for people to submit questions and find information, whether or not free consultations stick around.
But at the very least, as Forth points out, whether a multifamily development is interested in having EV charging at this moment or not, any developer should think about having the infrastructure, conduit and capacity ready to go for future install of EV chargers, and should consider the needs of current residents who are likely already considering EVs today.
It’s going to be necessary to install this capacity at some point, and doing so earlier can help save money down the line, make your development more attractive to renters today, and allow more renters to make the switch to cleaner transportation which helps air quality and to reduce climate change, both of which harm everyone on the planet.
Head on over to Forth’s Charge at Home site to get access to all the above resources – and to sign up for a consultation before the end of April if you’re a multifamily developer, owner, property manager or HOA.
Update: This article has been updated to account for an extension in program availability.
Electrek’s Take
I’ve long said that the only real problem with EVs is the problem of access to consistent charging for people who don’t have their own garage. Whether this be apartment-dwellers, street-parkers or the like, the electric car charging experience is often less-than-ideal outside of single family homes, at least in North America.
There are workarounds available, like charging at work, or using Superchargers in “third places” where you often spend time, but these still aren’t optimal. The best thing is just to charge your car wherever it spends most of its time, which is your home. When you do that, EVs outshine everything in convenience.
We’ve highlighted some projects before which showed how reasonable it can be to install charging for developments. Every project is going to have its complexities, but when you see projects like this condo complex that managed to install chargers for just $405 per parking spot, all of a sudden it becomes a no-brainer not to have EV charging.
But the fact is, there just aren’t enough apartment complexes out there which have EV charging. So if Forth’s Charge At Home program can help residents or landlords with that, it can go a long way towards solving the only real problem with EVs. Click here to check it out.
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Baltimore County, Maryland, just brought its first large-scale ground-mounted solar farm online, and it sits on what used to be the Parkton Landfill. The 213-acre site, once a symbol of waste, is now generating clean power that will cut costs, slash emissions, and turn an underused piece of land into a long-term energy asset.
Located north of Baltimore City, Baltimore County is one of Maryland’s largest and most populous counties, and its push toward renewables has major implications for the state’s climate and energy goals.
County Executive Kathy Klausmeier called the project a clear example of innovation meeting sustainability: “We are cutting costs for taxpayers and making investments that benefit our communities for decades.”
The new solar farm will provide around 11% of the Maryland county government’s annual electricity, producing roughly 8.2 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) in its first year. That’s the equivalent of avoiding greenhouse gas emissions from burning over 620,000 gallons of gasoline, powering more than 1,150 homes for a year, or driving 14 million fewer miles in gas cars, according to the EPA.
The 7 MW system includes four large solar arrays of 15,000 ground-mounted photovoltaic panels. It’s part of a growing trend in the US to repurpose capped landfills for renewable energy, turning dormant properties into productive clean energy sites.
Through a power purchase agreement with TotalEnergies, which owns and operates the system, Baltimore County will lock in reduced electricity rates for 25 years, with options to extend the contract for up to 33 years. That long-term deal protects taxpayers from future electricity price hikes while advancing local climate goals.
“Adding another large source of solar electricity to power our County’s facilities reflects our community’s values of making smart investments that take care of the health of our community and environment,” said Greg Strella, the county’s chief sustainability officer.
TotalEnergies Managing Director Eric Potts called the project a “powerful example of transforming underutilized assets into productive resources,” pointing to the dual benefits of cutting emissions and saving money.
Baltimore County’s next landfill solar project, at Hernwood, is expected to come online by 2028. Once that system is up and running, renewables will supply about 55% of the county government’s electricity use.
Read more: The Trump administration just killed the US’s largest solar project
The 30% federal solar tax credit is ending this year. If you’ve ever considered going solar, now’s the time to act. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.
Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here.
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