Junkyard Find: Electric-Powered 1988 Ford Ranger Custom
I’ve just driven a couple of modern electric cars, the Mitsubishi i-MiEV and the Tesla Model S, and they’re real cars. Actually, the i-MiEV is a perfectly serviceable short-distance commuter and the Model S is the best street car I’ve ever driven, but I was ready to hate both of them a lot, because all my previous experience with EVs had involved growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s and hearing a lot of eat-yer-vegetables talk from earnest green types about how electric cars are good for you, when in fact those cars sucked stringwart-covered pangolin nodules. Then, of course, there are all the flake-O electric conversions from the 1980-2000 era that I’ve seen, a fair number of which appear in self-service wrecking yards as long-abandoned EV conversions are towed out of back yards and driveways. In this series, we’ve seen this EVolve Electrics 1995 Geo Metro and this 1988 Chevrolet Sprint Electric Sport, and there have been others too stripped to be worth photographing. Today we’re going to look at a California-based Ford Ranger that still has just about all its electric running gear.
Some EVs like this were put together for driving around in warehouses, others were built by government agencies trying to showcase green technologies, and still more were built by backyard electric-car fanatics. Ford even built their own electric Rangers later on.
Since the battery box (or what I am assuming is the battery box) is so small, my guess is that this truck was made for short-distance indoor use. Running parts inside hangars at nearby Oakland Airport?
I thought about buying these gauges for eBay reselling later, but it didn’t seem worth the hassle.
The motor was still there when I visited this yard about a month ago, but the value of the copper inside it means that this is one part that will not go to The Crusher.
Great big Bycan battery charger under the hood.
I doubt that the sight of this truck had Chevron execs trembling.
I didn’t check underneath to see if the original automatic transmission was still installed. The shifter might have been just used to control forward and reverse.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
More by Murilee Martin
Comments
Join the conversation
Apparently Scientology is into E-Meters. "The E-meter is never wrong. It sees all; it knows all. It tells everything. -- L. Ron Hubbard" http://www.xenu.net/archive/books/tsos/sos-18.html I don't think they would be driving a makeshift electric vehicle with Lord Xenu into the hear after.
I bet the company that built this is the same one that built the subject of "Solo: Life with an Electric Car" http://www.amazon.com/Solo-Life-Electric-Noel-Perrin/dp/0393335194/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1413046932&sr=8-1&keywords=solo+life+with+an+electric The lettering matches, and both used Ford products as their base. I read this book probably 15-20 years ago. The author's Escort had a couple solar panels on the roof, so his sticker says "Solar Electric Car"