Make: AUSTIN
Model: 6 CWT VAN
Registration: SDM 642F
Year of Manufacture: 1968
Date First Registered: 08/03/1968
MOT Expiry Date: 27/11/2025
Current V5: YES
Location: PICKERING
Guide Price: SUBMIT BEST BID
You can view from: Monday 18 November - Tuesday 26 November 2024

Current V5 present. Paperwork includes previous V5, and DVLA correspondence.

The highest bid at the end of the auction will be submitted to the vendor for their consideration.

The vendor has provided the following:

Clearly, someone woke up one day in the production team and said: ‘You know what, we’re just not losing enough money’. Why else would you take a very presentable, entirely driveable 1968 Austin 6 CWT van, rip the guts out of it, and then spend months and a Transit-sized fortune trying to fit the workings of a Nissan Leaf into it?

Well, there was a reason…

EV conversions are probably the fiercest debate in the classic car community and we wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

Is electrifying classics a path to keep them on the road for the next 50 years or is it a direct route to crushing every element of soul these old-timers ever had?

We snapped up our Austin after some fierce bidding …it looked amazing and was priced accordingly (£18,000). Derek Mathewson had no idea why we’d bought it - as it seemingly didn’t even want for a polish let alone a restoration - and we tried to keep it that way. It was so secret it even had a code name ‘Project X’.

Off it went to George Kinghorn in Durham. George and his team have electrified everything from a Reliant Scimitar to a Nissan Bluebird. His engineers had sourced a crash-damaged Leaf through the salvage auctions for us, they stripped out the batteries, motor, and loom to be transplanted into our little Austin.

It’s a painstaking process, building battery boxes, detuning the motor, and yet trying to keep the original appearance of a 1968 Austin 6.

Work includes:

Electrifying

The conversion is based on a negative earth Morris Minor 1000 12V system. The original system has been left intact save for the removal of the parts relating to the engine and petrol tank. This means that accessories such as reversing lights, fog lights, warning lights, washer bottle pumps, etc can still be added as normal without overloading the system subject to the usual power considerations.

A relay has been added to the brake pressure switch to allow a feed to the VCU (vehicle control unit) to allow regenerative braking. A relay has also been added to the fan switch to control the cab heating. Otherwise, an entirely new 12V system has been added with respect to the electrification of your vehicle. The new system comprises two parts – a permanent 12V part and an ignition-switched 12V part. These are fed from two distribution fuse boards in the control panel under the dashboard on the passenger side. These have blown fuse indicator lights to aid in fault finding.

We are incredibly happy with the results. Kinghorns have retained the soul of this British icon while ensuring it is entirely emission-free at the exhaust.

We expect a range of approximately 70 miles but of course, this all depends on driving styles and how many heavy diesel generators the non-believers insist on carrying around in the back!

Talking about non-believers, Derek was horrified when he realised what we’d done until he drove it. He loved it…for a week or two…and then went back to his diesel HiLux. Can’t blame us for trying.

Please Note: We take great pride in restoring our vehicles but they are classics and will no doubt have imperfections. Please do your own checks before bidding.