To introduce the RX-8 conversion project, I felt it was appropriate to talk about the social reasons that have motivated me to build an electric car and this website. If you haven’t already figured it out from the rest of the blog, I absolutely love cars. Big engines that make tons of power dropped into cars that go fast: that stuff is cool to me just as it was cool to generations of gear heads before me. The problem was that I realized that if my love for cars remained a rigid concept, it would be broken with the changing of the times just as anything else in life. What I mean is that as mankind’s energy crisis grows, it’s harder for society to accept us as automotive enthusiasts. What they see is that we are spending all of our effort making cars that waste a lot of gas for our own entertainment. This growing division between automotive enthusiasts and the rest of society can end in two ways. The first is that we turn into diehards that refuse to change what we love doing until it becomes outlawed and our culture eventually dies out. The second alternative is that we take what we’ve learned working on cars and we evolve our lifestyle so that it can still be something we love doing but in an environmentally friendly manner that the rest of society can agree with. Based on the technology available to the home mechanic today, I believe that electric car conversions are the best way to ensure there is a future for us gear heads.

I’ll put the links to the project related entries here or you can find them by clicking on their category in the column on the right side of the main page.

Part 1: Why Build An Electric Car? Part 1: Oil
Part 2: Why Build An Electric Car? Part 2: Engineering
Part 3: Why Build an Electric Car? Part 3: Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt