1957 Porsche 356A Speedster Rickard Electric Signature Edition: This Porsche Replica Could Be the Future of Sports Cars

Hello, I'm Jack Rickard with EVTV. The 1957 Porsche Model 356A Speedster, surely one of the most beloved sports cars ever built. That was how we started our first video about nine months ago, and we talked a little bit about a conversion of a 1957 Porsche Speedster replica.

Neither of these cars are actually a Porsche. These are replicas built by Special Editions, Inc. in Bremen, Indiana.

I've come to favor them, and I think they may be better than the Porsche for our purposes in doing an electric car. Ferdinand Porsche and his son, Ferry, actually started what we know of as the Porsche Sports Car Company in 1948. By 1957, Max Hoffman here in the United States had talked them into doing a lighter version with a lower windshield called the Speedster, and it has become an icon of what it means to be a sports car.

In the intervening 50 years, Porsche has gone on with serial improvements in basically the same concept right up to today to become one of the, probably the leading definition of what a sports car is. These two vehicles produced by Special Editions, Inc. are replicas.

The bodies are made by Chamonix in Brazil, and they put them together in Bremen. There are a number of replica builders. A genuine Porsche in this kind of condition would run you $130,000 to $150,000.

A number of companies have introduced replicas in the $30,000 range for a roller. We like it as the basis of an electric car because it's a lighter body, fiberglass than the original steel, and stiffer. The Porsche Pan poses some problems to people trying to haul around a lot of batteries.

Ferdinand Porsche, interestingly, started his career around the turn of the last century, and one of his earliest cars was indeed an electric car, and he devised a hub motor that went in a wheel that drove the cars, and in fact did a four-wheel model with a motor in each wheel. He was also probably the inventor of the first hybrid. He coupled a gasoline engine to an electric motor before 1910 and developed a car that way.

He also designed the Volkswagen, and there are some characteristics to be shared between a Porsche Model 356 and a Volkswagen. We did this conversion as kind of an experiment, filmed it, and went on to do the Mini Cooper Clubman, and we're nearing completion of that again. Along the way, we started posting the videos in kind of a new experiment in publishing for us, that is a magazine that instead of being printed is published in HD video.

And instead of being distributed at newsstands and software stores, it's distributed globally using Amazon's CloudNet server, that kind of a farm of servers spanned across the globe, basically the footprint of Amazon.com. While we're pursuing that, my mission is to convince you to join our army. I don't think General Motors and Toyota are going to fulfill your dreams and get us to this next phase of converting to electric drive on automobiles. I could be proven wrong, and would happily be so, but the direction they're taking with little four-door sedans, economy cars, priced at over $40,000, I don't think most of the public's going to pay that premium for electric drive.

We think that you ought to go find a car you like and convert it, and that's what our videos are about. If enough of you do it, the rest of the public will become educated on the advantages of electric cars. Along the way, inevitably we've had some viewers who've come and looked at what we've done and said, well, you know, Jack, I'd like to have that car.

I don't want it bad enough to go to the garage for three months and spend my nights and weekends. You understand I have a career, I have children, I have activities, and I don't know when I would come up with the time to do such a conversion. The entire concept is to take a stand, kind of put a stick in the sand and say, I won't be bent over anymore at the gas station.

I think you'd get more out of it if you would put the time in and build the car you really want the way you really want it. But I understand, and I hate to tell people no. It's just not something we do well around here.

But we're not going to be car manufacturers, ever. We're publishers. Right now, it's video, and I'm on fire about electric cars, but we're not going to set up a production line and make cars.

Fortunately, there's other people who do make cars. Special Editions, Inc. of Bremen, Indiana, made our first roller, and we've ordered another one from them in what we're calling internally Speedster Part Duh.

We've just received it. We're probably going to call it something like Record Electric Signature Edition or something along those lines to differentiate it. But what we're going to do is a design, a redesign of our Porsche Speedster using some of the better components that have become available in the last year and some of what we've learned to produce a little bit slicker, a little bit easier to build version of the Speedster.

Hopefully, something a little bit more manufacturable, and we'll go through the details of how we do it, much as we have the Mini Clubman. In the end, you should be able to order a roller such as we've done from Special Editions, Inc. with a few key changes made to it that'll make your job easier and build your own.

If you don't want to chase down all the components, hopefully, we'll be able to make a kit available with all those components where you can get that. And if you just don't want to fool with it and have to have a turnkey car, ideally, we'll have it set up where you can do that. I promise you, I'm not going into the car manufacturing business, but I think we can do a redesign of what we've done that would make it easier for others to do and for you to do yourself.

So, my program would be to empower you to do what you want to do. In fact, you can get this not only as a roller, but as a complete car kit and do your own paint and your own everything to the car just the way you want it. Or you could get a roller and convert that to electric and just use our step-by-step guides as kind of a guideline to introduce your own variations.

Maybe you can figure out a way to do perpetual motion. And the third thing would be then if you wanted to just have a car like this, the answer's still the same, no, you can't have mine. We did put this up on eBay and caused quite a stir.

It drove a lot of traffic to our website, which is what I was after, and fortunately no one met the reserve, and so I get to keep the car. And it was with a great deal of relief. You put this kind of time and love into a vehicle, it's not something you want to hand off to somebody else for cash.

If you'll do your own, I think you'll feel the same way. So we're going to start a new project while we're still continuing the Mini Cooper and nearing completion. And we're going to take a brand new roller with some key changes that, had we known about them, would have made life a lot easier the first time.

And we're going to go through some of those changes.

Some key changes that had we known about them would have made life a lot easier the first time. And we're going to go through some of those changes so you can order one similarly. But the end product should be that you can have one of these cars for a reasonable amount of money and be able to drive electric.

So let's take a look at the new roller we've got from Special Editions Inc. of the 1957 Porsche 356A Speedster replica and see what some of those key features are. Let's talk about a few of the features of the roller that we think are important because we had to do them last time.

Start off with we've got four-wheel disc brakes. We're going to use regenerative braking on this version, but I still like having four-wheel brakes with another four or 500 pounds of batteries. I love these headlight grilles, but more importantly we're using 6000k bi-xenon headlights with Special Editions installed for us this time.

So that's going to be a little bit of a savings. We also have LED turn signals. In fact, all of our lights in the car, with the exception of the headlights, are light emitting diodes and that uses considerably less of our pack power while I think providing a little better light.

Under the hood, Special Editions has built a special box here in the front that's 11 1⁄4 inches wide, 12 inches deep, and 28 3⁄4 of an inch wide. Well it is now. Our box they got us a they cut us about a quarter of an inch, but with a proper hammer it's that size now.

But they're going to make these boxes the exact size to hold 16 of the Sky Energy 190 amp hour cells, 180 amp hour cells, or the Thundersky 160s. And so we can get the fact we've already put the in here so you can see kind of the layout of the cells. We also don't have a gas tank up under the carpet and that gives us an area where we can mount our chargers, some of our instrumentation, and a heating system to heat the cockpit.

So we're not going to have to craft our battery box in the front, which was a lot of problems, and remove the gas tank. We'll be able to install equipment up front quite capably. The cockpit is a place where you can spend a lot of money.

We've got good leather seats, but a lot of the things, the steering wheel, the shift knobs, the ivory knobs on the dash, we spent a lot of time chasing down the first time. This time they've installed all of them for us with some nice cocoa mats and carpeting that I think goes very nicely with the color of the car. We're going to try to use our CombiGage this time as part of our instrumentation system, and we do have a flip-up stereo that has a motorized screen that comes out and flips up, and ideally we'll have some instrumentation displaying on that as well for some of the electric car

You don't need to go to the extent we did on the steering wheel and the knobs if you don't want to. As I say, you can vary the price a little bit by moving around what you put on the interior of the car. We got the tonneau top and, of course, the convertible top, and so we like the way they've got it set up.

We did have a special switch added, a two-position switch here for our heating system that we're going to use, and the rest of it's pretty much stock stuff. The Porsche logo you're not going to be able to get from back. We trace that down ourselves for the horn button, which you can do as well.

It depends on how much you want it to look like Porsche, and in this case I just like that horn ring look, but you can get any number of other ones. In fact, we don't have it on our original Porsche, so that's the interior. Nothing really special there except we did have them install a stereo with a motorized flip-up screen, and that, if you specify the Rickard Electric Signature Edition, that's what it would come with.

At the rear of the car, we have a couple of interesting items. One, as I said, our turn signals, brake lights, backup light, and our license plate light are all light-emitting diode light bulbs, which will dramatically decrease our current draw on our DC 12-volt system. This is a backup camera that connects to that flip-up motorized screen stereo in the front.

Our objective here is to minimize the impact on the 1957 look of our dash area, but this car is very difficult to see out the back of if you have the top up, so a backup camera is pretty much a requirement. Inside, we've had them cut away most of the fiberglass where our battery boxes are going to be. We're going to have to do a little trimming

As this goes along, we hope to get special editions a little more involved in this area for the Rickard Electric roller specification, but right now, we have to install the motor yet and the controller and size the battery boxes, so we left it pretty much this way. One of the most important changes we made to the car is actually back here with the transaxle. It's a swing axle type, last made in 1968 with the short shafts.

Instead of the 388 ring and pinion that we had in the original Speedster, we've gone to a very unusual 3.44, and we've gone to some different gearing. I've got it here next to my heart, heart, heart somewhere. Oh, here it is.

A 2.64 to one in first gear, 1.93 to one second gear, 1.14 to one third gear, and a very high geared 0.70 to one fourth gear. In driving our original Porsche, we found that it's most comfortable to take off in third gear and shift into fourth, but we have a fourth speed transmission. The developments in transmissions, certainly in the VW transaxles in the years since, have been to lower gears, closer gear ratios, and higher engine RPMs, and many of the VW style motors that they drop into these rollers conventionally have RPM ranges up, oh, 4,600 RPM.

Most electric motors, and certainly ones in the affordable range that we are looking for, are in the zero to 5,500 RPM range, total motor RPM, but most of the torque is actually made from zero to about 3,200 RPM. I would say 3,000 or 3,200, and then the torque starts to drop off. So, our top speed on the original Mini was 95 miles an hour.

By going to the other direction from an internal combustion engine, we've gone to this transaxle with very high gears, like they used to do for the low RPM VW type cars in the early 60s, and that's going to hopefully shift our RPM band to where we can at least get second gear into play, and perhaps even first, and get back to a true four-speed transmission, and make use of the leverage that we get with that transmission for a higher top speed and a more usable first and transaxle. That makes it, if you do this transaxle with the welded gears and the extra plates to strengthen it enough to take that kind of torque, it winds up being a little bit more expensive transaxle. So, when you order this roller, they're going to tag you a little bit on the transmission.

My advice is to go ahead and pay it, because I think this is going to dramatically alter the performance of this car by shifting us back down below that 3200-3400 RPM range, where our torque starts to fall off, and we'll have much better acceleration, and a top speed we're shooting for 110 miles per hour, which was about what the original speeds were on the Porsche 356A with the 1600 engine as it was shipped in 1957. I think we can achieve all that and be very similar to that original sports car, with a very low center of gravity from

I think we can achieve all that and be very similar to that original sports car. With a very low center of gravity from the batteries, a very smooth ride like we got on the first Speedster, that additional weight was not a detraction, it was an addition. It made the car ride smoother and it also lowered the center of gravity to where on a curve it's just like riding on a rail.

It's not something we can show on video, but I think if people start to get into these Speedsters in the electric version, they're going to be shocked at the improvement in handling. This car weighs, as a roller, weighs 1,290 pounds. We put it on the long acre scale and has an almost perfect 50-50 weight distribution front to back.

Another sort of retro area is the tires. We tried several different things with the tires on the original Speedster and found, again, the very early VW tires worked the best. We've specced a 550 15-inch tire for this one that's really very similar to the original Volkswagen's.

It has a narrow tread, a tall form factor, and gives us, if we pump it up to 40 pounds, a rolling resistance that is much lower than the new Michelin tires designed for EVs. They're going to a narrower tread and a harder rubber. VW was there in the early 1960s, and so we can actually exceed what we could get with some very expensive low-rolling resistance tires by simply going back to the past and using the 550 15-inch tires and wheels that came with the car.

We also have the transaxle filled with some Redline transmission fluid, basically, for a manual transmission. It's like a synthetic equivalent of a 90 weight, but it's a very light oil in the transaxle. It's going to increase the noise, the gear noise from the transmission slightly, but it should reduce the friction quite dramatically.

Along with the tires and the transaxle, we also had this set up with no tow in on the front end. That gives you a little bit more positive steering, but your tires are actually towed in a little bit and are scrubbing down the road if it was carried to an extreme. We can get a lower rolling resistance by going to a zero tow in, which is exactly what they do on the Tesla version of the Lotus Elise.

So that gives us a little bit of not quite as secure a feel in the steering. The steering will still work perfectly, but it dramatically decreases that rolling resistance. So those are some of the changes we made to the basic Beck Chamonix roller that we think are going to make this car much easier to put together and make a much better electric car than we had on our original car.

In coming episodes, we'll talk a little bit more about controllers, DC to DC converters, our battery layout. We are going to an AC motor and an AC controller to deploy regenerative braking. We're going to decrease the number of batteries, increase their size a little bit, and try to get some of the range sacrifice back with the regenerative braking.

I think we can do a good solid 75-mile car that's easy to manufacture, and more importantly, easy for you to build or maintain and get at all the pieces. So we're going to employ what we learned on the first Speedster, on this one, to make a slicker design that's easier to maintain and get at all the component parts and will look a lot more professional. So stay with us.

This is going to be the project after the Mini Cooper. We'll start doing some elements of it at the same time, but by spring, we should have Speedster Part Da, or the Rickert Electric Signature Edition, pretty much completed, and I think it's going to be a great improvement over our first Speedster. As much fun as I have driving it, and as little as we've had to do to it since we've had it now for 14 months on the road, I think this one could be actually a fantastic car that anybody could drive and do very well with.

So for EVTV, I'm Jack Rickard. Stay with us through our next project, and I promise we will finish up the Mini Cooper, and we're nearing completion on that now, should have it rolling in the next few episodes. So stay with us.

It's really going to be pretty exciting times here at EVTV Motorhomes. Thanks for being with us.