A New Zealand grandmother has converted a 29 year old wreck into a homemade, solar-powered electric vehicle to show it can be done. Rosemary Penwarden, 63, has been driving her converted vehicle around South Island roads for three years now. The project took her and a friend more than eight months of solid work and tinkering. She said you have to be a little bit mad. I want to thank the oil companies for their motivation. Penwarden bought a 1993 car body from a wrecker and took the combustion engine out herself. She replaced it with a new gearbox and electric engine, then packed the front and back of the car with batteries 24 under the hood and 56 in the boot.
The project, including labour, cost Penwarden $24,000 12,300. The car is fully signed-off and warranted. Her project came to the attention of local reporters after several years on the road.
The refrigeration engineer Hagen Bruggemann, who helped Penwarden convert her car, has now converted about eight cars to electric engines. He says that you can talk about all this environmental crap, but you have to implement it.
Without free labor, he says converting a car is not a financially viable option for most people but there is a commercial argument for converting trucks and larger vehicles, where the body tends to be worth more than the engine. He says that the cost of converting a diesel truck would pay off within five years. He says that the polluters should be paying, but he doesn't see why they are not.
Penwarden is a long-time environmental campaigner, saying the time and money she devoted to converting her car isn't possible for everyone in a very privileged place but as the world adapts to the climate crisis, she wanted to illustrate the possibility. She charges the car at her home, which is fully solar-powered.
While Penwarden believes the car will pay itself off, she once spent $100 a week on petrol for commuting, but she says it wasn't a cost-saving exercise and wants the government to support conversions. She says it's a priceless thing to be able to show that it can be done. The biggest thing is to help stop the biggest polluters as soon as possible, and nothing we can do as individuals I think matters quite as much as that.