You can’t tell what’s the most unique about Steve Payne’s 1972 VW Squareback from its appearance. Granted, it’s a fairly rare car and has a cool retro patina, but what makes it truly unusual is that it’s fully electric.
Payne’s a partner in , with Ben Taylor, a ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ company that builds café racer e-bikes and offers electrified conversions of motorcycles and cars. His interest in vintage cars and motorcycles started long before the company’s inception and his interest in electrifying them.
“I’m a VW guy by nature and have owned Bugs and buses from the ‘60s on. This car is a 1972 Type 3 that was only made for a couple of years. It was basically a barn find. Someone parked it at an airbase and left it for 20 years. The patina is atypical for these cars. Normally, the floors rust off, but with this one, the rust started on the roof from snow. It’s really, really solid underneath.
Someone bought it and was going to make it a project, then lost interest. I watched the ad sit on Marketplace for months. It had a hefty price, and I finally called the guy, said this was my price and I’d take it. That was a year and a half ago. It had the original motor with automatic transmission, but was non-running. It was an early fuel-injection motor, but it would have cost $500 for basic parts just to make it run, and the transmission was pretty anemic.
I sold the original engine and transmission to another VW fan for half of what I paid for the car. I had a motor for a 2012 Gen One Nissan Leaf (an all-electric car produced since 2010) and as fortune had it, the early Leaf motors are easily configurable to weird spaces. The VW’s original pancake motor was under the trunk and hidden away. All the Leaf components fit perfectly. It’s entirely electric, with a custom subframe and CV axles for direct drive to the rear wheels.
I went to school to become a motorcycle mechanic in my early 20s, but couldn’t find an apprenticeship. I went into a completely different career and became an audio editor in the TV industry, but kept working on bikes on the side. I always had a motorcycle I was tinkering on.
Before my wife and I had kids (ages eight and 10), I came across an ad for a Bug. I knew nothing about them, but I showed the ad to my wife and she said, “Go get it!†I drove to London, Ontario, bought it and drove it home, and it broke down the second I got into my driveway.
I didn’t have a clue about the multitude of problems they had, but it put me in the world of air-cooled classic VWs and I met guy in my neighbourhood who had three or four VW buses. Then I started looking for a bus, found a cheap on that had been abandoned and have had five or six over time, including one I have now.
I did my first electric car conversion before I did bikes. I bought a ’72 Bug and it ran fine, but I enjoy a challenge. Lithium batteries were around then, but completely unattainable cost-wise, so conversions were being done with marine batteries. I found a starter airplane engine and went to Costco and bought a bunch of 12-volt batteries and wired them up. There were no YouTube videos then, so I’d go on online forums and learned things along the way. I converted the Bug, drove it for a year, then sold it. It was worth more with the original gas motor, so I converted it back.
Driving the Squareback is an unbelievably cool experience. It’s rear-wheel drive and has a 14Kw battery pack instead of the original 24Kw, as the VW is inherently a lighter car. It’s becoming my favourite car ever. It’s so peppy, responsive, it drives great. I’ll let people take it around the block and they are shocked when they push on the gas. It pushes you back, but won’t break your neck. I make sure the horn works, as people don’t hear you backing up in parking lots.
It’s unassuming, and the dashboard looks original. Other than one little screen with the battery status, you wouldn’t know it has any upgrades. I can top it up at any Level 2 charging station and I have a Level 1 station at home. It has a range of 100 kilometres, but it was never supposed to be a range car or one I wanted to take on the highway, even though I could. Like the e-bikes we build, it’s meant to be an in-town car. It’s my daily driver for three seasons. I put it away in cold season to protect it from salt. It’s my guinea pig, my prototype for car conversions.
I’ve had a 1978 VW bus for 10 years and it’s the best minivan ever. I put a Subaru gas engine in it to make it more reliable, and I have a Model S Tesla small drive unit earmarked for it. My other car is a ’87 Porsche 924 that fell into my lap. It had no engine, no transmission but the body was good, so it was crying out, ‘Come on! Turn me electric!,’ so I have a 2019 110 kW Leaf motor for it that will be rear-mounted.
One of my kids has earmarked the bus as his future vehicle and the other wants the Porsche. But the Squareback will always be around. Now different cars are showing up at our shop for conversions and figuring out the conversions is good for the brain. It’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle.
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