Skip to main content

How a teenager made his own electric car from a junked Toyota Celica

You don’t have to be Elon Musk to think outside the box. At age 12, Adam Lansing decided to convert a gasoline car to electric power after watching his older brother ask their parents for gas money. Six years later, Lansing cruises around in his own homemade electric car, but getting to this point took a lot of work.

The project got started when the father of one of Lansing’s friends overhead him talking about an electric-car conversion, and offered up an engineless 1980 Toyota Celica that was sitting outside his garage with a tree branch growing through the rear bumper. Not the most glamorous of starts, then.

Recommended Videos

It took Lansing two years to acquire all of the parts he needed for the electric conversion, and two more years to get the car running. He said he rebuilt the Celica 52 times, working up to 20 hours a day on the car to fix problems.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

“Part way around 35 to 40ish was when it got the most frustrating,” Lansing said in a Toyota press release. “But the support from my family, friends, and girlfriend kept me going. You have to keep in mind the end goal.”

Now 18 and recently graduated from Plano East High School in Texas, Lansing has a fully functional electric vehicle with a 130-mile range. He didn’t have to do everything alone, acquiring sponsorships from Core IV and Plasma Boy Racing. They supplied the 30-kilowatt-hour lithium iron phosphate battery pack that currently powers the Celica. It’s mounted in the trunk.

Toyota-Celica-Adam-Lansing-The-Electric-Kid-EV
Toyota
Toyota

Plasma Boy Racing founder John Wayland was one of the original inspirations for the project. While researching electric cars, Lansing found YouTube videos of the “White Zombie,” a 1972 Datsun 1200 Wayland converted to electric power for drag racing. The little Datsun showed Lansing that electric cars can be fast as well as frugal.

Lansing has started his own company, Hawkeye Innovations LLC, and hopes to make a living doing to gasoline-to-electric conversions. That’s becoming a burgeoning business, with companies like Genovation and Kreisel Electric converting familiar sports cars into high-performance electric cars. After all, who said new electric cars can only come from Detroit or Silicon Valley?

Stephen Edelstein
Stephen is a freelance automotive journalist covering all things cars. He likes anything with four wheels, from classic cars…
Pros and cons of buying a used electric car
Front three-quarters view of a 2023 Kia EV6 GT in a desert setting.

Electric cars have come a long way over the past few years. Gone are the days when the thought of an electric car was a novelty — these days, EVs are common, (mostly) available, and for the most part, refined.

But they’re also still relatively expensive, especially for a good one. That’s exactly why you might be thinking about buying a used one.

Read more
How much does an electric car battery cost?
Two Electrify America Charging Stations.

Electric cars are often hailed as being cheaper to operate and repair than gas-powered cars. It makes sense — on the operation side, you only need to pay for electricity (not gasoline), and on the repair side, there’s no motor or transmission to deal with.

But electric cars have other costly repairs, and while in total they do generally cost less than repairs for gasoline cars, it’s worth knowing about the potential costs ahead of time. Perhaps the most obvious, and one of the most costly, has to do with an electric car’s battery. After all, while all cars have batteries, those in electric cars are far bigger and more advanced — and thus can cost quite a bit to replace.
How much does an electric car battery cost?

Read more
VW previews its next electric car in trippy camouflaged form
Front three quarter view of a camouflaged Volkswagen ID.7 prototype.

The Volkswagen ID.7 is VW's next electric car, and while it won't be fully revealed until later in the year, the automaker provided a sneak peek at CES 2023.

VW said the production ID.7, which will be revealed in the second quarter of this year, will be influenced by the ID.Aero concept first shown in China in 2022. The camouflaged prototype VW brought to CES has the same general shape as the ID.Aero. It's a streamlined sedan that VW claims will have up to 435 miles of range as measured on the somewhat lenient European WLTP testing cycle.

Read more