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Who we are
London Electric Cars is a start-up run out of a small garage in central London.
It was started in 2017 by Matthew Quitter after he got fed up with the air quality and cost of petrol in London. He has a passion for classic cars and was excited by classic car EV conversions but soon discovered that they are expensive.
So Matthew set up LEC to figure out a way to bring down the cost of classic conversions. However, he realised that if he could get conversion costs low enough, they would offer a solution not just for classic cars but for all vehicles.
Our goal is to use second hand EV components salvaged from the most popular electric cars to deliver affordable conversions.
We also want to develop conversion kits to enable local garages and home mechanics to easily convert cars to electric.
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Development work is done mostly by Matthew but he is regularly joined by some great volunteers. He also benefits from sharing space with a local classic car club and is lucky to have the support of many Morris Minor enthusiasts, as well as the wider EV community.
We currently have space to work on four cars. We can carry out installations and develop our products. Welding, fabricating and other industrial processes are done off-site through our various suppliers.
Our prototype is a 1953 Morris Minor Series 2.
We took out the combustion motor and installed batteries and a suitable electric motor. All using only second hand equipment.
The car has been driving around London for over a year now and it’s loads of fun. It is a great short-range city car.
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Currently we're working on five customer cars: A classic Mini, a Land Rover Series 2, a Morris Traveller, a Karmann Ghia and a Citroen H Van.
Based on what we learn from converting cars we've started developing conversion kits for the Morris Minor, Series Land Rovers and classic Mini.
We continuously seek ways to reduce the costs of conversions.
Why we need your help
We want to hire great people, find larger premises to work on more cars, purchase equipment and increase the speed of development.
We need to hire some great staff. Ideally some of the recent volunteers who are talented EV fanatics and have been learning quickly. The more people working at London Electric Cars, the quicker we'll develop.
We have found a new, much larger space to move into, just round the corner from our existing site. With your help we'll be able to fully equip the new workshop, expand the number of cars we work on and have more space for research.
We want to explore the different sources of affordable EV components: Nissan Leafs and E-NV200, BMW i3s, Renault Zoes, Kia Souls, Mitsubishi i-Mievs and Citroen Zeros etc. as well as alternative sources such as recycled computer laptop batteries, electric motors from hybrid cars or rewound industrial motors.
We want to continue to refine our Morris Minor kit and speed up development of our other classic car kits. From there we will pick the most common cars on the road and develop conversion kits for those.
We would use your supporting funds to research ways to make conversions as efficient and affordable as they can be.
Why?
Living in London, or around any city, it’s clear that there’s a pollution problem. People should be driving electric cars, the average journey is under 6 miles and most of the journey is spent at low speeds. But buying an electric car is still expensive.
At the same time there are currently 1 billion combustion-powered cars, trucks and vans in the world. There are 37 million vehicles in the UK alone.
Nothing is really wrong with those cars except for their combustion engines. But despite that, as the world turns electric, current thinking would have them all headed for the scrap heap.
So why not make affordable electric cars by finding affordable electric car parts and converting old combustion engine cars.
How do you find electric car parts?
The biggest challenge to our plan is sourcing cheap electric car parts. To do this we’re buying salvage electric cars from breakers yards.
The top selling electric car in the UK is the Nissan Leaf so they’re the most commonly found electric cars in breaker’s yards.
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We’re focussing on development based around components from the Nissan Leaf.
As more and more electric cars are sold and prices of new electric cars come down so will the price of salvage cars.
We’re also exploring other sources of components, such as the recycled laptop batteries, electric motors from other industries,
What else are we working on?
We’ve had lots of interest from the Minor community and are converting a Traveller at the moment. We have produced early versions of a kit that would allow any Minor enthusiast to convert their car to electric.
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In the garage at the moment we’ve also got a 1969 Land Rover Series 2, a 1980 Classic Mini, a Karmann Ghia and a Citroen H Van.
From the experience of the Minor kit we’re also working on kits for classic Mini’s and Land Rovers.
We’re eager to properly explore ways of using recycled laptop batteries in traction packs.
We also get involved in talks about electric cars, encourage young adults to come and spend time in our garage and evangelise about electric cars generally.
We’re also chasing the UK government for help, the OLEV for grants and we’re working to push down the price of a conversion below £10,000 for 100 miles range and rapid charging. If we could persuade the government to allow the plug in grant for conversions we could get closer to prices starting from £5,000.
Press
The Sun
