The Housing Shortage: Solutions Are Out There (Part 6 of a Series)

Sitting in a coffee shop recently, I heard two guys in their thirties complaining about the unaffordable housing in the Boulder area. Not a novel topic, but what struck me was that these guys were a doctor and anesthesiologist, people we tend to think don't worry much about housing costs. So I decided to do a little digging.  The price of the average single family house in the US during 2022 was 5.6 times the median income; in Boulder it was 8.5 times the median income. And these guys were complaining that in the neighborhoods they'd checked out, all the newer houses were just plain too big, as if they'd been designed in (and for) a different generation. Ironically, this conversation took place just over 5 miles from Prospect New Town* in Longmont, Colorado, which was founded in the mid-1990s by Kiki Wallace and designed by the architects at Duany Plater Zyberk. Their design brief was to provide a variety of housing types, from small apartments to townhouses, and including attempts at reinvigorating the old single family formula...

By the time I first visited these traditional but tastefully-proportioned and detailed townhouses facing a park in Prospect, the Great Recession had brought its own woes to the economy, and many builders who left the construction industry never came back. 

Owing to shortages of cash and labor, architects began to check into the "tiny house" movement, and that, in turn, led to revisiting the notion of prefabricating houses and housing subassemblies in factories, in the same way cars are built.  We heard that if a Chevy Impala was built in the same way as the average home, that is, outdoors, by framing, mechanical and electrical crews who were strangers to each other, it would cost as much as a Rolls-Royce, and be kind of a crummy car.  The idea of fabricating entire bathrooms in factories was hatched by Chicago architect Bertrand Goldberg soon after WWII, using enameled steel, below. By the time I stayed in a medieval stone building in Regensburg, Germany in 1997, fiberglass was the material largely forming a standardized, manufactured plug-in bathroom that worked just fine.

Come to think of it, the other notably expensive room in the average house, the kitchen, is also the site of pretty familiar activities that could be addressed by standardization.  Somehow it's a relief that the suppliers of the efficiency kitchen below have gone with a cheerful color out of step with the current fashion for dull gray.  Also, the glossy finish is easy to achieve in a factory.

By 2016 our practice had designed several small standardized houses that could be suitable for factory production; the largest, the 982, was named for its area in square feet.  The roof on the house was designed to resist high winds; it only rolls back in the video so you can check out the efficient plan layout.  One tiny house was built in Big Sur to our design in 2008-09; at 660 sq. ft., it was efficient but not standardized in any way, as its trapezoidal plan needed to nest between a cliffside and a larger house on Hurricane Point.

Also in 2008, I visited "Home Delivery" exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art. This was a now-famous exposition of architects' efforts to design manufactured housing for easy delivery, in the case of "tiny houses" as complete units, and in the case of multi-story structures, as an easily-assembled kit of parts.  One that caught my eye was the Micro-Compact by Horden Cherry Lee Architects in London.  It was designed for easy delivery by helicopter as emergency housing for workers in disaster zones. The display unit was fabricated in steel, but later ones were built in aluminum for easier transport.

When I checked recently on the fate of the Micro-Compact idea, it turned out that while a demonstration village of Micro-Compacts had been built in Munich in 2005, only 16 units had been built by 2012, and that the 1.8 ton modules originally costing around 35,000 GBP each had been adopted by several clients as high concept vacation homes.  Visionary architect Richard Horden died in 2018.

Architects and urban planners who took projected population growth figures seriously focused on cities fairly early.  Moshe Safdie had schemed out his futurist housing complex, Habitat 67, for Expo 67, a "universal exposition" in Montreal.  Relying on intriguing alternation of mass and space, the reinforced concrete complex positioned landscaped terraces on the roofs of many units. Designing the lower units with enough strength to support upper ones added to complexity, and would've been easier with computer-assisted design, which had just barely arrived in the mid-Sixties, when it was used to assess dynamic loads on race car frames by Ford... 

By the current era, computers had made it relatively easy to design stackable modular housing using engineered lumber and mass timber techniques, saving concrete along the way.  And not a moment too soon; the United Nations predicts that while 55% of the world's population lives in cities today; 68% will be city dwellers by 2050. More ominously, it predicts that the ecosystem, already stressed under the weight of 8.2 billion people, will need to support 2.5 billion more by 2050.  What this means is that to allow for all these new city dwellers, the world needs to build the equivalent of a new New York City every month between now and then.  A friend who is not an urban planner immediately asked the right question anyway upon hearing this: "Where is all the water going to come from?"  Not only drinking water in drought-prone regions like the American West and Sub-Saharan Africa, but water for all that concrete.

This leads back to the idea of finding natural limits.  As education spreads through societies, their birth rates drop. As storms, floods and fires caused by climate change affect more regions, insurance companies may have more of an effect on where people settle than zoning laws; in some regions of the US, that's already the case.  And in a world of limited resources, the need to limit carbon (and thus concrete) leads us back to a house we admired at that 2008 MOMA show.  It's the 5-story Cellophane House by Kieran Timberlake Architects.  It was built of off-the-shelf aluminum framing components with steel connectors, and was 80% complete in only 6 days, a pretty impressive feat when you factor in the foundation placement, and the limited access to the site in Midtown Manhattan. Though the firm has gone on to design larger, award-winning projects, their exhibit is the most memorable one from the "Home Delivery" show.  If we're going to house humanity in urban environments, spatial efficiency and time savings are essential.  The lightweight, light-filled Cellophane House still holds real promise for an urban-centered future.

*Footnote:  We featured Prospect New Town in this series on February 22 of this year, in "Housing Part 5: Finding the Missing Middle."  We revisited industrialized housing systems in earlier posts, reviewing the post-WW2 Lustron system, along with the Case Study Houses and a parallel French project, in "Modern Housing Solutions Part 3 (or 4): The Case Study Era and the Lustron Adventure", posted here on March 30, 2023.  For a look at kit houses, starting with a surviving 1920s Sears kit house in Boulder, see "Kit Houses: A Solution to Overpriced Housing", posted Jan. 15, 2023.  For Part 2 of a rambling series on mobile, modular, prefabricated and kit houses, you can visit "Mobile vs. Prefab: If It Can't Go Anywhere Can It At Least Look Like Home?", in our archives for August 3, 2017.  In that post, we provided detailed descriptions of the MOMA project houses.  The first in this series was "When Mobile Homes Were Really Mobile:  Bowlus and Airstream", posted July 30, 2017.

Photo Credits

Top & 2nd, 6th & 10th (bottom): the author

3rd:  HB-09418-C: Chicago History Museum, Hedrich-Blessing Collection

4th:  buildingandinteriors.com

5th:  Video by Ben Lochridge, design by Poeschl Architecture

7th:  Horden Cherry Lee Architects, featured in Dezeen

8th:  wikimedia

9th:  archdaily.com

 

Jacques Tati's "Trafic" from 1971: Monsieur Hulot Infiltrates the Car Industry

Director and actor Jacques Tati made his last appearance as Monsieur Hulot in "Trafic", released in 1971, around 18 years after his first appearance in "Les Vacances de M. Hulot" ("Mr. Hulot's Holiday"). In between those cinematic bookends, his famous tan raincoat and well-worn brown hat got plenty of wear, along with his umbrella. In "Trafic", Tati, who had tackled the perplexities of modernism in "Mon Oncle" and "Playtime", sends Hulot into the heart of the auto industry.  Somehow it seems appropriate that a culture that gave us flying CItroens with hydropneumatic suspensions (see above) would also give us an offbeat perspective on the car industry itself... 

It may be significant that in French back then, trafic signified some kind of racket or illicit trade.  The English meaning of traffic was connoted in French by la circulation.  In the title shot above, graphic designer Michel Francois signals the director's focus on the automobile's often zany effects on modern life.  The scene behind the title shows men working in a stamping plant making car bodies.

In the plot, Hulot has somehow gotten a job as an industrial designer for a fictional car company named Altra, a company that has assigned an American publicity agent, Maria (Maria Kimberly) to shepherd Hulot's new model to a car show in Amsterdam.  In keeping with the nomadic spirit of the era, he sketches out a whimsical little van for le camping.  Though Tati's critique of materialism is less sharply-focused here than in "Mon Oncle", perhaps because Europe and American were still in the afterglow of Woodstock Generation hippiedom, he shows how the revolution symbolized by camper vans could be commercialized.  Features of his little car include faux wood paneling in American style...  

…and a skylight over the sleeping space in the rear.  Along the route to the auto show, the crew gets help loading and unloading their van into Altra's transport vehicle. Not surprisingly, they get detoured by misadventures, including a flat tire and running out of fuel.

After transport driver Marcel breezes through Belgian customs without stopping, the little van is impounded by police, who suspect that it has been stolen.  Among the features of his design that Hulot demonstrates to cops and to Marcel is this grille that folds down into an actual grill, perfect for barbecuing steaks or burgers whilst involved in le camping.  

The police are impressed with all the features tailored to a life of le camping, but don't release the van until the next day, when the proper paperwork arrives.

Maria, who has run ahead to catch a preview of the auto show, returns and picks up Monsieur Hulot and they continue to follow the transport in Maria's yellow runabout (a Siata Spring 850) accompanied by her little pooch. They get involved in a chain-reaction car wreck in a roundabout, Hulot helps out an accident victim, and then they need to get repairs made. While that's happening, someone steals Maria's dog as a gag, and by the time the pooch is returned, they are running seriously late...

By the time they arrive a the Amsterdam show, all the exhibits are being dismantled, and Maria realizes she'd gotten the closing date wrong. It seems that Maria's talent for disorganization matches Hulot's own, and that the two characters are, as the French would say, sympathique...

Hulot investigates one of the last standing exhibits of a DAF 55, a non-fictional car from a Dutch company that today makes trucks.  He gets into the show stand car...

Then discovers it's a cutaway display rotating on a spit like a roasted chicken. Meanwhile the Altra company director discovers that his belatedly arriving team has been billed 300,000 francs for their non-existent exhibit, and fires Hulot.  It appears that Maria is now out of a job as well...

The two escape into a pouring rainstorm under Hulot's umbrella.  Director Tati gives us shots of comic interactions in the passing cars, including a couple whose hand gestures match the rhythm of windshield wipers, and Hulot and Maria draw together as they scoot in front of a rare Lancia Fulvia Zagato.  Though Tati has always been skeptical of the effects of cars on society, he's always managed to find choice cars for filming.

By the film's final scenes, Hulot and Maria are escaping the rains together after running the wrong way down a subway exit, and it's clear they're happily on their way somewhere that is not inside the auto industry. Director Tati's concluding scene, though, is of cars jammed into what looks like permanent gridlock, going nowhere, the result of the industry's and the advertiser's dream of offering Everyman his own private locomotive.  It's a gently funny movie, in a different spirit than the subversively comic "Mon Oncle", and without the often riotous hilarity of "Playtime", At release time, the New York Magazine critic Judith Crist praised "Trafic" for being a "non-blockbuster", and Tati's little road trip of misadventures still feels that way.

Photo Credits:  

All scenes from the film, including the initial publicity shot of the flying Citroen DS, are from Films de Mon Oncle and Les Films Corona.

Forgotten Classics: Giugiaro's Taxicabs—A Checkered History

In the mid-Seventies, the Museum of Modern Art commissioned Giorgetto Giugiaro of Ital Design to design a prototype for a modern taxi. MOMA's home city was by then known for its clogged streets and familiar yellow Checker cabs.  Not surprisingly, Giugiaro came up with something completely different. With the cooperation of Alfa Romeo, he created a 5-passenger taxi in 1976 that measured 158" long, a whopping 46" shorter than the familiar Checker.  Power came from a fuel-efficient 1.3 liter boxer 4 cylinder driving the front wheels, with independent suspension front and rear. The Alfa shield grille shape is subtly (maybe too subtly) worked into the 5-mph bumper at the front.

Innovative features included wide, sliding passenger doors on both flanks, flat floors, and wheelchair storage space under the seats. Giugiaro's MOMA taxi offered striking space and fuel efficiency advantages over other cabs, especially the Checker. Sadly, it didn't attract enough interest from potential customers to put it into production...

Not discouraged by non-adoption of his Alfa-Romeo MOMA cab, Giugiaro proposed the Lancia Megagamma van above in 1978.  Front wheels were again powered by a boxer four, but this time by the 2.5 liter SOHC Gamma unit.  Driver's cabin and luggage space were more ample than in the MOMA taxi, as the Megagamma van was just under a foot longer at 169.7".  Fuel tank and spare tire were located below the flat floor.  Drag coefficient was surprisingly low for such a cubic form, at 0.34. Fiat managment showed a lack of vision by deciding not to produce this van.  Six years later, Chrysler engineers would confirm the soundness of Giugiaro's concept, when their own front-drive minivans helped revive their company's fortunes.

This wasn't the first time that Giugiaro had been involved in a taxi project.  Eight years before the MOMA project, he had begun a complete restyling of the Checker cab for Alejandro De Tomaso after the sports car builder had purchased Ghia. The Checker project was continued under Tom Tjaarda after Giugiaro left Ghia to start Ital Design. The resulting '68 Ghia Centurion as completed by Tjaarda, above, shared the clean flanks and glassy greenhouse of Giugiaro's previous 4-door project, the Iso S4 below, but none of the iso's sleek proportions.  The tall roof and too-vertical angles of the Centurion's windshield and backlight made for plenty of space, and also concealed the car's great length, as it was on the 129" wheelbase option offered by Checker. Though the Centurion was more modern-looking than Checker's standard design, the company apparently decided it didn't offer enough advantages to put into production. 

That standard Checker design had been largely unchanged from the A8 model below, which went into production in January 1956.  

A8 advantages over the previous A6 model shown rushing down a film noir street below included 30% more interior space and easily removable fenders, an important feature in an environment conducive to fender benders...

Despite the proposals from Ghia for a more modern-looking Checker cab, and from MOMA and Giugiaro for a taxicab revolution, Checker's basic design from the A8 stayed in production until 1982, receiving quad headlights in 1958, with Chevrolet inline sixes and small-block V8s supplanting the Continental L-head six in 1965.  It was such a familiar shape on American city streets that it was likely what you thought of when you thought "taxi."

It was a blocky and unrefined shape, but it was a friendly one, especially when one answered your hand signal for transport on a freezing New Year's Eve in New York.  In fact, it was such a friendly-looking car that this example has taken advantage of that blockiness and been modeled in Lego components at Legoland New York, delighting children of all ages...

Photo Credits:  

Top thru 3rd from top:  wikimedia.com

4th:  allcarindex.com

5th:  Iso Rivolta, featured on story-cars.com

6th:  Checker Car Club, on checkerworld.org

7th:  imcdb.org

8th & bottom:  Dr. Marcus Nashelsky

Book Reviews in Brief: Source Material for Car Wonks & Historians

 

An old 1954 paperback copy of Ken Purdy's 1952 The Kings of the Road was this writer's intro to "serious" automotive literature (well, books on cars, anyway) around the time he became entranced by Road & Track after one formative year of living in LA (Dad and I loved it; pioneer cyclist Mom hated it) during the late 50s.  Purdy could effortlessly pull a grade-school kid into stories about Bugattis and Duesenbergs, of race driver Tazio Nuvolari, and how to avoid confusing Hispano-Suizas with Isotta-Fraschinis...

Borgeson and Jaderquist's Sports and Classic Cars appeared 3 years after Purdy's book, as the sports car boom was beginning to gather momentum in the US, and collectors were suddenly waking up to landmarks of design and engineering made during the interwar years that had sometimes been sold for scrap during WW2.  The photography is monochrome and sparse by modern standards, but the book is strong on history, and the specification tables at the end, covering Prewar Sports, Prewar Classic, and Postwar cars, are a valuable source of information.  If you want to compare engine specs., dimensions and prices offered by Lancia before and after WW2, for example, this book has you covered.

Wheelock-Freeman's Sports Cars appeared in 1955, the same year as the Borgeson / Jaderquist book, and while it has some specifications and prices, it focuses more on the visual impact of the cars. The Fifties marked the beginning of Italian dominance in industrial design as well as on the track, and Alexandre Georges covered then-new creations in color and monochrome photos.   As 1955 may have been a peak year for the number of sporting makes on sale in the US, you'll find chapters on etceterini like the Siata, exotics like the 4-cam V8 Pegaso from Spain, and on the Chrysler-powered Cunningham from Florida, which was then in its last year.  

The Sports Car Pocketbook, by Britain's WIlliam Boddy in 1961, proved to be a bountiful source of info on everything from the cyclecars of the Teens and Twenties to upper crust esoterica like the Brough Superior and the Lammas Graham, as well as cars considered modern at the dawn of the Sixties.  Specs. were provided for key models of each make, but the author had a special love for obscure club racers.  If you want to know how to tell a Senechal from a Salmson, Boddy's your man.

In The Great Cars from 1967, Ralph Stein wrote something that was almost as much a memoir of a life spent chasing classic cars as it was a depiction of the cars themselves. The depiction, though, was pretty riveting for a high school kid, including recollections of encounters with France's exotic Talbot-Lago, arcane English machinery like the Invicta and Frazer Nash, and better-known classics from Alfa Romeo and Mercedes-Benz.  The pages are splashed with color photos by Tom Burnside, as well as historic monochrome shots from races that were already decades in the past.  

The Cruel Sport covered an especially hazardous time in Formula 1 racing, when a driver's chances of survival were said to be not all that much better than in trench warfare.  Robert Daley created text and monochrome photos depicting the drivers, machines, factories and races that made the world of Grand Prix racing from 1959 through 1963, and later expanded to book to include the period through 1967, after the 3 liter cars had taken over from the 1.5 liter formula of 1961-'65.  It's stunning to page through this book and reflect that rollover protection was only introduced in F1 cars in the mid-Sixties, that seat belts were not required equipment until 1972, and to realize how many of these drivers were gone a few years after the original publication date.

In All My Races from 2009, Stirling Moss recalls details of all his races from the first, a victory in the Cullen Cup in a prewar BMW 328 on March 2 1947, to the last (race #585), when the driver who later became Sir Stirling crashed Rob Walker's Lotus 18/21 at Goodwood's Glover Trophy on April 23, 1962, ending his racing career and nearly his life.  In the intervening 15 years of race accounts, the greatest driver who never won a World Championship sheds some light on the people and machines who made the era what it was.

By the time G.N. Georgano released A History of Sports Cars in 1970, there was plenty of history ot recount, at a time when the freewheeling, innovative attitude that led to everything from the spindly voiturettes of the Twenties to the wild Lamborghini Miura of 1967, with its transverse mid-mounted V12 sharing its crankcase oil with the transmission, was about to give way to a world of safety regulations and environmental concerns.  Georgano documented the history with chapters covering Emergence through the Twenties, Thirties, Post War Recovery and Today (the Sixties), with a nation-by-nation treatment. The text is supplemented by monochrome and color photos, with coverage of specialist car makers as well as major producers, and the engineers and designers behind the ideas in what we can now see as a kind of golden age.   

Historians Richard Langworth and Graham Robson released their revised edition of their Complete Book of Collectible Cars in 1987, extending the scope to include cars built as early as 1930; the first version had started with 1940, and thus missed a herd of classics. It includes US as well as European makes, and is pretty complete, but because the writers focused on their idea of production cars, you won't find an OSCA or Gordini* in here.  For some reason, Bugatti and Delahaye are included, but not Talbot-Lago. And while the Datsun Z is in here, the Toyota 2000GT (already a collectible in the Eighties) is not, nor is the Honda S600/800 series. Still, it's remarkable how many times one finds oneself going to this book for production figures and dates, engine sizes, wheelbases and weights. 

Beyond the cars, this blog explores the architecture and cityscapes of the automotive era, and urbanists have written thoughtful studies of these as the present century approached.  As this is an election year when voters are considering (one hopes) serious questions of history and public policy, it might not be a bad moment to put in a plug for James Howard Kunstler's The Geography of Nowhere, from 1994, and his more hopeful Home from Nowhere from 4 years later. The first book details how the postwar growth of US suburbs led to placeless expanses of shopping malls and parking lots, old neighborhoods sliced up by freeways, and cities strangled by gridlock, and the second book explores how we might take steps to make our living places friendlier to each other and to the ecology of the only planet we know supports life...

*Errata: Owing the the uninvited and annoying interference of AutoSpell, "Gordini" was changed to "Gordon" without my noticing.  Wrong.  Britain's Gordon-Keeble was included in Langworth's book, while the French Gordini sports racers from the Fifties were not.

Boulder Classics and Coffee: The Usual Suspects + Porsche 912 Polo

Now that it's almost time for the last Classics & Coffee of the year on Sunday. October 27, we're finally getting around to reviewing September's gathering.  There were lots of old friends and increasingly familiar old cars,  a sign that the event now has lots of regulars...

...including this Bugeye Sprite heading up a row of Austin-Healeys.

Big Healeys were represented by a 100-6 with graceful body design by Gerry Coker, who also designed the Bugeye.  By the time the Bugeye appeared in 1958, Coker was surprised to see that BMC had deleted his retractable headlights as a cost-cutting measure that, ironically, gave the car its character and name.  By the time the less curvy Sprites like the red car above appeared in 1961, Coker had been working in America for 3 years.

This black Ferrari 355 is a reminder of what a loss it is that Pininfarina no longer designs or builds car bodies,  A mid-engined V8, it offered cleaner detailing than the previous 348 and was built from 1994 to 1999. 

Familiar faces include now-vintage BMW 3-Series, Alfa GTV6, Karmann Ghia VW, and a pagoda-roof Mercedes SL without its famous concave-surface hardtop in place.

Another familiar face from my neighborhood is this metallic yellow Alfa Romeo Type 916, a front-drive roadster never officially imported into the USA.  Featured in more depth in a previous post, the Pininfarina design was built in coupe and open forms, and the 916 series was offered from 1993 to 2004.  

A row of Brits includes the '76 Lotus Sprint in the foreground, a Triumph Spitfire with Honda S2000 engine , a Triumph TR4A in white, and a yellow TR6.  The Lotus and Spitfire have been featured in earlier posts, but it's worth noting that the Lotus Type 907 engine was a pioneer of the 4-valves per cylinder twin-cam four in the US, and notable for making 140 to 160 hp from 2 liters.  Nearly a third of a century later, Honda's S2000 engine with 4 valves per cylinder could make 120 hp for each of its 2 liters.

A De Tomaso Pantera is a less-familiar visitor.  The black car with gold wheels is a reminder that Lincoln Mercury dealers sold a mid-engined V8 with Italian bodywork (designed by American architect Tom Tjaarda for Ghia) from 1971-'74. It's parked next to a red Ferrari Testarossa...

There were plenty of air-cooled Porsche 911s, but none pleased this writer as much as the 993 below.  Last of the air-cooled Porsches, the 993 was offered from January 1994 to early 1998, which has always seemed like a short run, considering that it smoothed out the visual hiccups in the original, like headlights that were neither vertical nor contoured into the fenders (see above), and finally integrated the 5-mph bumpers into the fenders and nose, avoiding the clunky look of 911 bumpers that arrived to meet US standards in 1974, and stayed until they were smoothed out a bit on the 964 in '89.  Another thing Porsche changed on the 993 was the Targa version, which substituted a smooth, coupe-like roof form with sliding glass roof for the visual interruption of the anodized B-pillar / roll-bar featured from 1965. This coupe specimen has an especially fetching form because it doesn't have the "wide body" option which involved increased rear track.  It's parked next to a Lancia Delta Integrale HF that we'd also like in our fantasy garage...

The other Porsche that attracted our attention was an early 912.  Well, sort of.  Designated a 912 Super, nothing like it was ever offered by Porsche.  It has a special 4-cylinder, twin-plug, 2.4 liter version of the air-cooled SOHC 911 engine designed and built by Dean Polopolus of Polo Motors in Temecula, CA.  The idea is to have 911 performance with handling more akin to the original 912, because the Polo engine weighs 100 lb. less than a 2.4 liter 911. The original weight difference between a standard 912 and 911 engine was 120 lb.

In addition to this engine, the Polo 912 has a number of other design tweaks to denote It's a special car, including the custom engine vent grille, 912 Super insignia, and flush-contoured license plate panel, and the piece de resistance, the "NO911NV" license plate.  At the front, you can barely see the specially contoured vent grilles next to the parking lights.

The label on the fan shroud tells the story of the Polo engine, which has been made in sizes from 1.5 to 2.4 liters.  As the engine alone costs around $30k, we wondered if an easier way to achieve more balanced handling in an air-cooled Porsche would be to simply find a nice example of the mid-engined 914-6, with near 50/50 balance.  Admittedly, you'd need to get used to the humorless, boxy styling of the 914, but then again, you're inside looking out when you're flinging a Porsche around a twisty 2-lane...

Another approach that occurred to us had appeared at a Classics & Coffee last year. Farland Classic Restoration in Englewood, CO converted a similar short wheelbase (87") 912 to a full electric power offering about 100 miles of range in normal driving.  One goal of the conversion was to avoid making structural changes, like cutting into the floor platform. As a result, as with Jaguar's prototype electric E-type conversion*, one could theoretically convert the car back to IC power.  But that's hard to imagine, as the 912 EV offers much better acceleration than the original along with better balance.  Also, you can keep shifting gears if you like. Unlike many EVs, the 912 conversion* uses the original 4-speed transaxle.  912s were also offered with 5 speeds.

Farland quoted a price of $45,000 for converting a 912 (or 911) like this one.  That's more than the roughly $30,000 you'd pay to buy a Polo engine for a 912.  But to make a fair comparison, the yellow Polo 912 features other impressive (and expensive) mods, and in either case you'd need to pay for a 912 to serve as your project base.  And two features of the Farland 912 EV jump out as advantages.  First, instead of just removing 100 pounds from the rearward weight bias, it changes the whole weight distribution from something like 40% front / 60% rear to the ideal 50/50.  Secondly, with the Farland approach you'll never need to stop at a gas station except to air the tires, clean the windshield or buy a chocolate bar...

*Footnote:  

The Porsche 912 EV was featured in our post for July 31, 2023.  Other classic conversions to electric power, including some Porsches and that Jaguar E-Type, are reviewed in "Classic Cars Go Electric", posted here on July 31, 2021. 

Photo Credits:  

All photos are by the author.