1966 Ford Mustang Converted into a Tesla with Working 'Full Self-Driving'

Brajeshwar 159 points 115 comments May 04, 2026
electrek.co · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (20 comments)

sublinear

> It demonstrates that Tesla’s hardware and software stack is more portable than the company’s licensing struggles would suggest. Unless I missed something, this is a completely unsupported claim by the article. Passion projects and retrofits are nothing at all like manufacturing.

dmix

People have been doing these conversions forever with teslas.

wishinghand

I’d love to do something similar to an El Camino. I don’t even need triple digit range; I’d use it as a local runabout, mostly to my art studio.

beedeebeedee

Neat. I would have preferred the original interior over Tesla's, but I guess it would then just be an electric conversion and not a "Tesla" conversion with "FSD".

AndrewKemendo

There was a shop in Dallas back about 20 years ago that did an electric conversion of a H1 Humvee. Since then there’s been lots more conversions like that and to me that is a valid recycling business.

annoyingnoob

Interesting, love the concept. Don't love the modern interior.

jazzyjackson

Whatever happened to the electric delorean reboot? EDIT: at one point whoever owned the name also owned a warehouse of spare parts and was going to produce an electric retrofit kit for the old vehicle, and hinting at manufacturing new ones a la retromod. Whoever owns the name now just has concept rendering on their site and a Solana token, so, little more than a meme coin now :(

LurkandComment

I've been waiting for someone to do something like this as long as I've known electric cars to be a thing. I hope they just start making them like this.

drdebug

Nice work, but is it just me or does this take away from the car’s original spirit?

t1234s

I wonder if tesla will see this and try to invalidate the VIN from using FSD

zthrowaway

As a classic car owner/hobbyist, this disgusts me. But thankfully there are at least 200k other restored/restorable 60s Mustangs out there.

ryan42

Here's one of a fully custom Toyota 4x4 truck getting a Tesla Model 3 motor that I enjoyed. I would love to have a small electric pickup like this, but I don't want to invest $100k to get it done https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siEhd4Z-6Ts

actionfromafar

Oh, a good looking Tesla.

AngryData

From the article it sounds like the inverse, they took a Tesla and stuck a classic car exterior shell on it, not transplant the electric car parts into a mustang frame. It is still kind of neat but is not the same thing to me. You don't normally upgrade a classic car by chopping out the entire frame and sticking the body panels onto a modern car.

condiment

This sort of conversion gets coverage every once in a while and it's been neat to see old frames getting chopped onto new electric drivetrains. I spoke with one of the people interviewed in this article[1] a couple years back about converting an old truck I have sitting around into an EV. The Model 3 approach takes their unified rear axle (motor,axle,wheels) and mounts it into an existing frame. Then you just need to find a place to stuff the batteries, retrofit some high-voltage electronics, and you're off to the races. One of the drawbacks of that approach is that it changes the stance of the vehicle, but for this Mustang that doesn't seem to matter much - it still looks classic. Other converters either go for the high end with a model S and fit the motor into a traditional drivetrain for a sleeper build, or they go for the low end and take an old forklift motor and batteries and build what is effectively a street-legal golf cart. Prices range from $5-100k depending on your level of DIY and how dangerous of a classic car you want on the other side of the process. [1] https://coloradosun.com/2023/06/25/classic-cars-electric-veh...

loeg

> It’s likely the first non-Tesla vehicle to run FSD, and it achieves 258 Wh/mi — roughly matching the efficiency of an actual Model 3. This claim is implausible, right? The Mustang is unambiguously less aerodynamic than the Model 3; there's no way it is achieving similar efficiency, especially at highway speeds.

hnav

Retro-electric stuff makes so little sense since it's the worst of all worlds. Part of why Teslas get decent range is the slippery body. I wince every time I see people clamoring for the VW Scout reboot. Rivian too with their 140kwh batteries just to give people that nostalgic body-on-frame SUV look with usable range.

sottol

I really like the look of the car, but from the title it sounds like a Mustang has been converted into an FSD Tesla ("teslafied" Mustang) - but Tesla suspension, Tesla interior... this smells like a Mustang body fitted onto a Tesla chassis ("mustangified" Tesla). I suspect that this might be more of a "Mustang body kit" on a Tesla chassis and not retrofitting the Tesla tech into a Mustang chassis + body. Still cool, but maybe misleading.

rootusrootus

That's really cool, though I confess I would have preferred the interior to have been more Mustang and less Model 3. Just a quibble, though, the effort is fantastic.

yabooey

This is such a waste of time and money and wow it’s absolutely gorgeous and I want it

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