Rosemary Penwarden says the vehicle, powered by home rooftop solar, has been running smoothly for three years and has thanked oil companies for the motivation
grandmother has converted a 29-year-old wreck into a homemade, solar-powered electric vehicle, “to show it can be done”. Rosemary Penwarden, 63, has been driving her converted vehicle around South Island roads for three years now.
The project took her and a friend more than eight months of solid work and tinkering. “You do have to be a little bit mad,” she said. “I want to thank the oil companies for the motivation.” Penwarden bought a 1993 car body from a wrecker’s, and took the combustion engine out herself. She replaced it with a new gearbox and electric engine, then packed the front and back of the car with batteries – 24 under the hood, and 56 in the boot. In total the project, including labour, cost Penwarden $24,000 . The car is fully signed-off and warranted. After several years on the road, her project recently came to the attention of Rosemary Penwarden says though converting a car isn’t possible for everyone, she wanted to illustrate the possibility.Refrigeration engineer Hagen Bruggemann, who helped Penwarden convert her car, has now converted about eight cars to electric engines. “You can talk as much as you want about all this environmental crap, but you have to implement it,” he says. Without free labour, he says converting a car is not a financially viable option for most people – but there’s a strong commercial argument for converting trucks and larger vehicles, where the body tends to be worth much more than the engine. Converting a diesel truck, he says, would pay off within five years. “Really, the polluters should be paying – I don’t see why they’re not,” he says.
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