During lockdown I bought a white 1989 VW T3 Syncro. A week after I got it the engine stopped working, so I sent it back to the seller who put in a new engine free of charge.
Because it rose from the dead, its nickname is the Zombie Kombi. It has served me well in the years that I have owned it, and my family have had some wonderful trips in it.
This is not my first rodeo with a really old car, and my previous experience has been that the constant maintenance stops being fun about 5 years in. So, my declared plan was to either sell it, or convert it to electric in 2025.
The electrification project has turned into quite a rewarding hobby. In the last 5 years I have probably accumulated several hundred hours of reading on the subject, and a corner of my garage is now full of salvaged EV components. Over the course of 2025 I am attempting to wire this all up into a working system outside of the car. If this is successful, I will remove all the old petrol driven parts of the vehicle and replace them with EV components.
I maintain a few project-specific pages on the Zombie here:
If you scroll past the image below you’ll see a list of blog posts related to the conversion project.
