Finding a Car

When choosing a car to convert, here’s some criteria to consider in descending order of importance:

• Cost
• Condition
• Ease to convert
• Coolness

Let’s start with the most important criteria first!

Coolness

One of the questions we get asked a lot is: “Why not just buy a cheap electric car and drive that?”

It’s not a bad question, and it’s one that we sometimes ask ourselves. “Because this car is so much cooler” is usually a pretty good answer to that question. Pretty much right off the bat we knew we wanted to convert a “classic” car. We especially wanted the boxy look of cars from the time period. Finding a car from the 60s or 70s would be cool, but in New England most of them are either complete rust buckets or way too expensive for us to afford. By the 90s cars started taking on a more streamlined, aerodynamic design. So we settled on the 80s. Cars from the 80s provide a nice middle ground of classic looks, affordability, and modern-ish safety.

Ease to convert

We knew we needed to find a car with a manual transmission, as converting an automatic often involves completely swapping the transmission and replacing it with a manual. We also knew that a car with manual windows, door locks, and other accessories would be less of a pain.

Condition

In general, it’s wise not to buy a car that’ll disintegrate into a pile of finely ground rust if you sneeze or give it a particularly stern glance. We’re not exactly car people (at least not yet) and we really didn’t want to have to do any extensive body work on the car. So we were careful to find a car with a body in decent condition. Given that we’re taking out the engine entirely, the engine doesn’t actually need to work. In general, cars that don’t work command a slightly lower price than cars that do. That said, we did want a car with a working transmission, brakes, and steering, so we couldn’t just buy a complete lemon.

Cost

Originally, our budget started out at about $5,000. We were looking to spend around $1,000 or so to get a decent car to convert.

Now, considering all these criteria, imagine how happy we were when we discovered this listing on Facebook Marketplace.

• Cost: $1,000 is exactly our budget!
• Condition: No rust!
• Ease to convert: Manual transmission, manual windows & door locks!
• Coolness: Just look at this thing!

You can imagine then that we might’ve been a bit disappointed when we saw this:

Uh-oh…

We tried messaging the seller, offering $1,200, and a few days later we heard… nothing!

At this point we were starting to lose hope and began the process of wallowing in sadness because the Rabbit was pretty much exactly what we were looking for. We looked around on marketplace, but couldn’t really find anything nearly as good. We did find a pretty decent 2004 BMW, but it had an automatic transmission which we’ve determined falls short in the “Ease to convert” department.

A couple days later, we still heard nothing. In fact, we realized we actually hadn’t heard from anybody we had messaged. Not a soul. We were starting to wonder whether something might be wrong with our account, so we tried using Zack’s account to message the seller.

Sure enough, the next day, we got a reply!

It turned out the other seller couldn’t make it until the end of the month, but we were able to swing by right away.

Now we just needed to figure out how to get it home…