You’ve probably heard about the cretins who’ve desecrated works of art by hurling paint at them — but have you heard about the company that’s desecrating classic sports cars such as early Porsche 911s by gutting their engines and transmissions and replacing them with electric motors and battery packs?
To be clear, we are not talking about placing an aftermarket, 911-looking shell on an electric skate. A kit device, in other words. No actual 911 was harmed. That would be harmless, in the manner of a kid’s toy race car set.
We are talking about the evisceration of classic 911s and Mercedes 280SLs and so on — of which there are only so many. It is much worse than the sacrificial offering of all those ’69 Dodge Chargers that gave their last all to make the General Lee look like it could go airborne and come down again without breaking its back in the process. That was for entertainment purposes, and it was also the late 1970s/very early ’80s — which is when The Dukes of Hazzard originally aired. Those sacrificial Charger stunt doubles were then only about 10 years old and — at that time — just old cars.
If you cruised past any high school parking lot in the early ’80s, you’d see lots of such old cars, which had yet to ascend to the status of collector cars. Teenagers drove those kinds of cars back in the early-mid 1980s. So it was no sin in anyone’s mind to jump a couple dozen old Chargers to make that one Charger — the General Lee — look like it could make such jumps with impunity.
The same thing was done during the filming of Smokey & the Bandit a few years prior. Multiple ‘77 black Trans-Ams were crippled (and ultimately, crushed) to make Burt’s black Trans-Am seem to be immune to the laws of physics. But it didn’t make you cry to see it because Pontiac was building more ’77 Trans-Ams, and there were plenty of them to go around. Once upon a time, they were everywhere — and almost anyone could afford one.
We took them all for granted; We thought there were plenty and also that there’d be more. We never dreamed of the future in store for us. It’s like that opening scene in Soylent Green in which Charlton Heston and his friend relish a steak because eating one has become a rare indulgence, and mostly for the very rich only.
But this isn’t even a steak. It’s not even meat.
What Everrati — that’s the close-to-EverReady name of the company that’s gutting classic Porsches, Land Rovers, and Mercedes — is doing is fundamentally different than what was done to make the General Lee look unbreakable and Burt’s TA look like it could fly.
It is high-end vandalism. The mutilation of art for the sake of people who have no understanding of, much less appreciation for, art. They do, however, have plenty of money. The lobotomized 911 sells for $500,000. (RELATED: When Cars Were Cars — And Cup Holders Held Cups)
It’s all perfectly legal, obviously — and people have a right to do as they wish with their property and their money. But that doesn’t mean that what they’re doing isn’t despicable and tragic. There are only so many classic 911s, Land Rovers, and Mercedes “pagoda” SLs left. It has been half a century or longer since the last of their kind was made. Ruining the survivors is like deliberately shooting and then taxidermizing one of the few remaining Amur Tigers rather than appreciating the beasts that still walk the earth.
Consider what has been done to the 911 by these barbarous, uncouth people. The sound of the famous air-cooled boxer six has been stilled. The sound no other car made because no other car had an air-cooled boxer six. This is as much of what made the 911 a Porsche as two all-beef patties make a Big Mac. Without those two all-beef patties, what you have is something that isn’t a Big Mac anymore, no matter what the wrapper it comes in says.
A person who wants a Porsche, on the other hand, is likely not going to be turned on by the idea of owning what amounts to a Tesla that looks like a Porsche.
In its place, a pair of electric motors — something every other EV already has. No word from the company as to what becomes of the Porsche’s original drivetrain. We probably do not want to know. (RELATED: VW’s EV: Only 10 Percent Loss!)
“EverReady” touts the power and performance of the gutted 911’s battery-electric powertrain, as if that’s all that mattered.
It is the error made by every manufacturer of EV performance cars, except Tesla, which is defined by being a battery-powered performance car. It is what people buy Teslas for. A person who wants a Porsche, on the other hand, is likely not going to be turned on by the idea of owning what amounts to a Tesla that looks like a Porsche.
The battery-powered 911 is very quick. So is a Tesla. So is pretty much every other battery-powered device. There isn’t much for the driver to do, though.
Well, not insofar as driving.
In a 911 with an engine (and a transmission), there is. There is clutch work and shift work, and there is keeping the six in the sweet spot as you straighten your line coming out of a sweeper. There is the howl of the engine out back and the breeze from the open quarter windows in your face.
In the disemboweled 911, the driver pushes down on the drive-by-wire accelerator pedal, and that’s about it. There’s nothing to shift because there are no gears, because there is no transmission. It is just this far away from being a kind of amusement park ride. You still control the rate of acceleration, but not much else. It’s like one of those high-speed elevators in a tall building that goes from the lobby to the 75th floor in just a few seconds. It’s exciting the first four or five times. By the 10th time, you’re hardly paying attention.
Why must some people take the something-special out of things? I cringe like the Indian in those ’70s commercials urging people not to throw trash in the river whenever I come across a classic Pontiac (or other such now-extinct race of car) and see a modern, Chevrolet (it is always a Chevrolet) crate engine in the thing, usually fuel-injected on top of that, occupying the engine bay where a Pontiac V8 once lurked. It is not a matter of the modern Chevy crate engine being more powerful (it is) or some other by-the-numbers antiseptic measure of “better.” It is a matter of taking away the thing that made it what it was, more so than any other thing.
What Everrati is doing is an even worse thing because everything that made these classic car victims what they were has been taken away. There is almost certainly some Green Grift going on, too.
Company PR says EverReady “meticulously restores each vehicle to preserve its heritage while precisely engineering a zero-emissions, full-electric powertrain — offering enhanced performance, refinement, and sustainability.”
Italics added.
There’s not enough whiskey in the cupboard, is there?
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