Arc Motor founder and chief executive officer Sloane Paul and her brother, chief operating officer Tom Chep, stand next to the restored and electric 1974 Ford Bronco in the company's new 6,000-square-foot shop in Peterborough, Ont.Matt Bubbers/The Globe and Mail
Electric cars are usually quiet, but not this one. This 1974 Ford Bronco – converted to run purely on battery power by Peterborough, Ont. startup Arc Motor Company Inc. – whirs, roars and hums down the road.
With no roof and a body like a metal bathtub, occupants are treated to a strange symphony of knobby tires on tarmac, the whine of straight-cut gears in the transfer case and the rush of air swirling around the cabin. At times, it sounds almost like diesel. Press the feather-light accelerator to the floor and, unlike modern EVs, there’s no sudden jolt of acceleration that kicks passengers back into their seats. Progress is slow and steady. Rolling down the road the old Bronco wanders in its lane; it’s as if the steering wheel only gives the front wheels a vague suggestion on where to go. Range is rated at 320 kilometres, which is plenty; you wouldn’t want to go farther in an old open-top Bronco anyway.
Cruising along a rural road outside of Peterborough with the sun sparkling through the trees, the electric Bronco seems like the ideal companion for Instagrammable summer adventures.
Surprisingly little of the classic car’s character has been lost and it still drives like a classic Bronco even after its electric heart transplant. This bodes well for the future of classic cars.
Nevertheless, some people hated what Arc founder and chief executive officer Sloane Paul and her brother Tom Chep, the company’s chief operating officer, had built. When they showed their electric Bronco at the 2024 Canadian International Autoshow in Toronto, Paul remembers strangers coming up to them only to tell her how “disgusting” it was, how she’d “ruined” a classic car by electrifying it. The vitriol surprised her.
“I’ve always loved cars,” Paul said. As a teenager, the only poster on her bedroom wall was of a blue BMW Z3. “I was a 13-year-old girl and all my friends had Justin Timberlake [posters].”
Her idea with Arc Motor Company is not to ruin classic cars, of course, but to save them. The company’s stated goal is, “to preserve the legacy of iconic classic cars by sustainably re-engineering them into powerful electric vehicles for today – and the future.”
Thankfully, along with the hate also came some interested customers. Following the initial burst of publicity in late 2023, Arc received hundreds of inquiries from people all over North America who were eager to have their old cars converted to battery power. Many were turned off by prices that can run to more than $100,000, Paul said, but when we visited the shop in July three new conversions were underway: two more classic Broncos and a Pontiac Firebird convertible, which was up on a lift with its gas engine removed.
The restored and electrified Bronco for the most part still looks the same. The gear selector is new, but you still need a key to start it.Matt Bubbers/The Globe and Mail
“We had our first three customers booked in the first three months [after launching the company in 2023], which is crazy right? That’s already half a million dollars [in revenue],” Paul said.
In 2021 with a dream and passion, she quit her marketing job at Microsoft, used her entire home equity line of credit and sold her highly modified gas-powered classic Bronco at auction to fund the business. In 2022, she bought a Bronco in rough shape and had it restored by Alberta’s Legacy Speed & Body shop. After two years of researching and working on electric conversions in the evenings and weekends, Chep quit his engineering job in the summer of 2023 to work for Arc full time and finish the build.
He and Paul are the only full-time employees, but there are seven more people working part-time or on contract doing design, engineering, fabrication and marketing.
The company received loans from Peterborough and Kawartha Lakes branches of the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario. That latter one helped Arc to move into a larger 6,000-square-foot shop and expand its business to include sales and consulting of EV charger installation.
Paul expects the charger side of the business – called Arc Recharge – will be steadier, sustaining it through the ups and downs and challenges of classic EV conversions. It’s a niche market today, but it’s a niche Paul expects will inevitably grow as the world transitions away from fossil fuel.
An internal combustion engine sits next to vintage Ford Broncos ready to be electrified.Matt Bubbers/The Globe and Mail
There are roughly 43 million collector vehicle in the U.S., which is 16 per cent of all registered vehicles in the country, according to classic car insurance company Hagerty.
“The [U.S.] classic car market is worth a trillion dollars. It’s incredible,” said Paul, who still owns a pair of old Broncos in rough shape and a 1980s BMW 3 Series. “But what are you going to do when we have net-zero emissions by 2050?”
Sales of new, non-hybrid combustion-engine cars in Canada are slated to end in 2035. After that, traditional gas-burning cars should slowly go extinct, at least in theory. The ultimate fate of collectable cars is an open question.
Owners of gas-powered cars with sentimental or collectable value surely won’t want to send their classics to the junkyard in the not-entirely-unlikely-event gasoline becomes wildly expensive or hard to find sometime in the foreseeable future. Right now that future is hard to imagine, but it’s the reason Porsche is investing millions into so-called synthetic fuel, or eFuel, and why Jaguar looked into offering an EV conversion service for owners of the classic E‑type. Both brands are trying to preserve (and ensure the value) of their classic models.
A growing number of specialist firms around the world are offering de-ICEing services: removing the internal combustion engine (ICE) and installing batteries and electric motors in its place. A handful of shops in British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec will do just that. In the U.K., Everrati Automotive Ltd. has built a name for itself by offering beautifully restored and electrified Porsche 911s, vintage Mercedes SL convertibles and classic Range Rovers. California-based Zero Labs Automotive is developing its own modular EV platform to convert all kinds of classic cars. Meanwhile, online marketplace Alibaba is overflowing with EV conversion kits for around $1,000 that seem too cheap to be real (or safe). There’s even a burgeoning scene of underground hot-rodders who are swapping cubic-inches for kilowatts.
But when Paul first wanted to convert her beloved old Bronco to battery power back in 2021, she couldn’t find a local shop that could do it to her specifications. At the time she’d been working at Microsoft in various marketing roles for nearly seven years, and didn’t know where to start. So she called her brother, who conveniently happened to be an electrical engineer with a decade of experience in nuclear energy, construction and automotive, and asked him to help convert her Bronco.
“I called her back and I said ‘No, give up. Impossible,’” Chep remembers, “and she said let’s do it anyways.”
The first conversion, the turquoise Bronco, took roughly three years of research and tinkering on evenings and weekends to complete. Chep built the Bronco’s battery pack himself out of salvaged Tesla battery cells.
“This is just a bunch of parts that [Chep] manhandled together,” Paul said of their first Bronco conversion. During our drive it was running at only around half its full output of 346 lb-ft of torque. “It’s not going to be as smooth as what we will provide our customers,” she assured us. Future builds will use the motors’ full power, with stronger mounts and a steering stabilizer to improve precision. It helps that the technology and parts available for EV conversions have improved dramatically in just the last year or two, Chep said.
Arc’s next conversions will have electric motors similar to those in the Ford Mach-E, supplied by Cascadia Motion LLC, which is a subsidiary of Tier 1 auto-industry supplier BorgWarner Inc. The battery and motor controllers come from AEM Electronics, and the modular battery packs are made in the U.S. by HyperCraft. Scanning each new car in 3D will make future conversions easier too. The result, Chep explained, should be far less tinkering and faster builds.
Even with the electric motor and battery, it still drives like a vintage Bronco and wanders all over the road.Matt Bubbers/The Globe and Mail
Prices start at US$75,000, excluding labour. Roughly 80 per cent of the parts cost is the battery, Chep said, so the price varies significantly depending how much driving range (and therefore how big of a battery) customers want. Costs should come down as the EV conversion industry grows and matures.
Paul and Chep see Arc Motor Company as a long-term business; they’re imagining a future in which finding a mechanic to work on your old combustion-engine car is going to be hard and gas is expensive. They’re getting into the nascent EV conversion space early with the hopes of being among the first-movers. When talking to potential investors, the reception has been largely positive, Chep said. But, there are some who entirely reject the premise that gas cars will ever become obsolete.
If – and this is a big “if” – governments stick to climate targets, then in 20 or 30 years some of those same people who initially hated Arc’s electric Bronco might be looking to companies like Arc to save their beloved classics from obsolescence by converting them to battery power.