Spoiler alert, if you are a muscle car purist, this article is not for you. For in this, a Plymouth Satellite receives an electric heart transplant, right from a Tesla Model S. We did warn you, right?
YouTube channel Holley brings you Kevin Erickson’s Electrolite, an aging muscle car that just got an electric glow up and rolls deadly silent now, with 600 horses to boot. Here’s the DL.
Kevin Erickson And His Daisy Duke Car
Erickson is from Denver, Colorado, and says that while everyone loved the Dukes of Hazzard Dodge Charger, he loved the Plymouth Satellite, Daisy Duke’s car. And he loved it enough to bring a 1972 model back to life, by running it on a Tesla Model S drivetrain.
As Erickson says, it may look like a muscle car, maybe pro-touring but the insides are so radically different, it takes a while for you to truly get the Electrolite.
The build began, at least on Instagram on March 14, 2020 – so you can call it a pandemic live wire. If you look at Erickson’s Instagram, you can see it took a while for the car to come to life, finally running on the asphalt on May 8, 2021. So there’s a ton of hard work behind the perfection you see.
Kevin Erickson’s 1972 Plymouth Satellite is one cool cat at the inaugural Holley High Voltage event. As Holley says, “It's shapely Mopar B-body is now powered by a full Tesla Model S powertrain, has over 250 miles of range, and from the get-go, is a street-driven machine.”
The Challenges Along The Way
The Tesla Model S drivetrain is a whole 500 lbs, if not more, and yet with 600 horses added in, it makes this Plymouth Satellite fly on the asphalt like a sleek, lightweight bird. For the suspension, Erickson built a pushrod suspension, and it all sits in the trunk of the car.
The same space also holds in four of the 16 battery cells, the other 12 being in the front where a V8 used to reside. There is, of course, a lot of aftermarket parts that have gone in to turn and control this ex-muscle car and now EV.
As Erickson says, this is something today’s generation is pretty hyped about, and he wants to be able to build cars with his kids. And so he turned a muscle car into an EV, because the future, is most definitely electric.
Sources: YouTube, Instagram