It looks like any ordinary auto mechanic’s garage: a mint-condition classic Landy, another later model with the hood up and parts on the floor, racks of components, an old Volla Beetle in the corner, the smooth shell of a Karmann Ghia beside its chassis, and the inevitable wreck in the other corner.
But look closer and something extraordinary is going on in this small workshop south of Johannesburg. On the Karmann’s chassis, where the gearbox should be is a simple metal frame, and where the petrol engine once was is an odd cylindrical green plastic object, not a functional engine at all but a 3D-printed mock-up of an electric motor.
For this is the bespoke workshop of Halley Abbot, the brainchild of Johannesburg-born Anthony Abbot, who, with 12 years’ experience as an engineer for two winning Formula One teams under his belt, returned to his home city where he now converts smoky classic cars into clean, green electric vehicles (EVs).
The newer Land Rover is a short wheelbase 2010 “90” Defender. Its new drive train sits prepped on the concrete, except in this case there is only a standard transfer case, and the original gearbox is entirely supplanted by a compact aluminium reduction box and gleaming electric motor.
This tiny replacement system is as outlandish as the power-plant of a Landy can get. The now-empty engine bay is available to house the new battery box.
His latest conversion is the older Landy, a short wheelbase 1970 Series III model, which now boasts a 150kW-peak electric motor. It stands in the workshop entrance on charge, but were it not for that cable plugging it into the wall socket, one would never know it was an EV.
The gear-lever appears as normal, but beneath the floor activates a simple electric switch changing motor direction. Even the charge-point is disguised by what looks like a bog-standard aluminium fuel cap.
Everything looks period factory, but a telltale sign at this late stage of Abbot’s build is that where one of the black-faced dashboard dials should be, there’s still a hole with a little touchscreen control-panel nestled inside. That’s about to be changed to what will look like an ordinary dial, but will retain its touchscreen function, controlling the electric systems.
The 1970 rides just like it should: bulky, ungracious, a rattle here and there. Classic Landy, with just a little bit more power; not too much, mind — one of the key challenges with an electric conversion — and after all, Halley Abbot’s core design ethic is about staying as true to the original as possible.
“A lot of designing and building electric vehicles has nothing to do with the electronics, but about how the batteries and components fit safely and snugly into the body without disturbing the vehicle’s classic lines or changing the vehicle’s feel,” he tells me.
Abbot grew up in a family of petrol-heads, his late father John starting his own business and making a name for himself restoring and selling classic Porsches, a passion that is continued today in Johannesburg by Abbot’s brother, Tim.
Anthony gained his BSc engineering from Wits in 1988, followed by his doctorate in fluid mechanics in 1995. Yet despite this grease-monkey background, his early career path was in banking and e-commerce, co-founding two software companies.
Then in 2003 a former fellow Witsie, Giles Wood, got in touch. Wood was working as the head of simulation at McLaren Racing, and brought Abbot in as a contractor, introducing him to many players in the exclusive F1 world, but Abbot was still working in software for Standard Bank in Johannesburg.
That changed dramatically in 2007 when Wood, by then head of simulation at F1 upstart Red Bull Racing, invited Abbot to join the team as his principal software architect.
Abbot jumped at the chance to get a whiff of high-octane fuel, and relocated to Britain where he, Wood and their design teams modelled Red Bull’s F1 car for the design engineers.
“Formula One is a very quick-moving environment where they recruit the brightest young brains. At 40, I was very old when I joined that world.”
He says that Red Bull’s advantage at that point was that it was not burdened by the engineering legacies of other teams, and so could get really innovative in the two years they spent designing a system that would model the car on a simulator that they also designed.
Driver Sebastian Vettel, who Abbot describes as “an intelligent and humble guy”, worked closely with the teams in ironing out the kinks, and their hard work was proved on the track when Red Bull Renault won the F1 championship in 2010, with Vettel taking the chequered flag, a performance he repeated over the next three championships.
In 2014, Abbot moved to Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 as head of simulation software. The experience there was different, with more legacy systems and processes, a result of the team’s long history as BAR Honda and then as Brawn.
The sometimes-discordant older systems resulted in driver Lewis Hamilton not completely trusting the Mercedes’ simulator or the new improvements. This made the introduction of the new systems far more challenging than at Red Bull.
Despite these issues, the team went on to win the F1 championship that year and was one of the most dominant teams in the sport’s history until 2020. Abbot acquired nine successive double world championships between the two teams in this process.
Abbot left Mercedes in 2019 and returned to his roots in Johannesburg. When the Covid-19 lockdown was declared he was attempting his first electric conversion, a 1958 Porsche 356A Coupé.
The primary challenge was to fit all the new electrics in without drilling so much as a single hole in the classic body — and in making the conversion entirely reversible. Having achieved that by trial and error, the Halley Abbot company was born.
Abbot’s process is exceptionally detailed and very hands on. First, because few classics have detailed engineering plans, he 3D scans everything that requires adapting, using computer-aided design to build a virtual model.
Then, as with the Karmann chassis, he replaces the gearbox and engine with steel and 3D-printed surrogates for the reduction box and electric motor, so he can ensure perfect mounting alignment and fit for the real parts.
The reduction box is vital as the electric conversion, for the “90” Defender motor, for example, peaks at 260kW and 16,000rpm, so it needs to be stepped down at a 3:1 ratio to work harmoniously with the vehicle. Also crucial is a double radiator system, one cooling the motor/inverter and the other the batteries. The reduction boxes and cooling systems are designed and fabricated by Abbot.
The best-of-breed motors and the lithium batteries are imported, but the fabrication of all other parts are outsourced to specialist component manufacturers, all based in SA. Though Halley Abbot is a one-man outfit, he employs between 13 and 20 contractors.
There are replicable elements, Abbot says, like the cooling system and reduction gearbox, which he is already selling to the handful of specialist electric conversion companies in the UK: “This is hi-tech, low-volume work, too small for China or India, but far more cost-effective than any UK designer and fabricator can manage.”
With every project tailored to the client’s specific requirements, and painstakingly manufactured individually to spec, Abbot’s conversions do not come cheap: the 1970 electric Landy conversion set the proud new owner back more than R850,000.
But it’s all worth it for what he calls the “bragging rights” of his client, who successfully showed off their quiet, reliable and novel electro-beast on the beaches of Plettenberg Bay over the festive season.
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