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.

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  • Wjtinfwb My local Ford dealer would be better served if the entire facility was AI. At least AI won't be openly hostile and confrontational to your basic requests when making or servicing you 50k plus investment and maybe would return a phone call or two.
  • Ras815 Tesla is going to make for one of those fantastic corporate case studies someday. They had it all, and all it took was an increasingly erratic CEO empowered to make a few terrible, unchallenged ideas to wreck it.
  • Dave Holzman Golden2husky remember you from well over decade ago in these comments. If I wanted to have a screen name that reflected my canine companionship, I'd be BorderCollie as of about five years go. Life is definitely better with dogs.
  • Dave Holzman You're right about that!
  • EBFlex It will have exactly zero effect