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At a public electric vehicle charging station in 2026, you can typically expect to see Teslas tussling with Chinese-made SUVs, people getting wires crossed about payment apps, and more than a few plugs losing their sockets at the Nissan Leaf owner who’s ducked off for a pub lunch while their fully replenished car takes up a charger.
What you’d be less likely to witness is a 1960s Mini Cooper, 1950s Land Rover or 1960s Porsche 911 parting the sea of flying sparks to pinch the next available charger.
Yet these are the scenes being created by Jaunt Motors, a Melbourne-based start-up fast earning a global reputation for some of the highest quality and most discreet classic-car electric conversions in the world.
The Jaunt team has converted 20 vehicles to full electric in the past five years.
“We just had a little cake [to celebrate],” Jaunt Motors co-founder Dave Budge told Drive.
Budge said there are 17 more classic conversions in the works and more orders waiting to commence.
With conversions costing about $200,000 (excluding the car), Jaunt’s services won’t be for everyone, but Budge said it’s targeting the kind of person who spends $313,800 on a new Defender OCTA.
As well as offering wholesale classic restoration services, Jaunt will take the spluttering combustion engine from your Mini Cooper, Mini Moke, original Land Rover, classic Porsche 911 – any classic car, really – and fit an electric motor with significantly more power.
Vehicles from Jaunt Motors are effectively hand-built with up to 1500 new parts, most of them hidden to preserve the heritage character of the classic in question.
Many Jaunts are old Land Rovers implanted with a single, 200kW/340Nm new Tesla electric motor driving all four wheels. Two battery packs (55kWh and 110kWh) are available, offering approximately 200km or 400km of range.
The Jaunt Mini comes with a 19kWh battery pack – preserving its original weight – and a 72kW/175Nm electric motor driving the front wheels. With about 170km of range, the Jaunt Mini – like all Jaunts – can be DC fast-charged at your local EV charger, in the Mini’s case up to 70kW.
Budge said he had converted many sceptics by simply giving them the keys.
“They get in and drive it, it pushes them back in their seat a little bit and they’re like, whoa, this is awesome,” he said. “And you’re like, ‘this isn’t even in sport mode’.”
Despite the high price, an electric classic appealed to many customers because it resulted in almost no “wear items”, they could recharge the car using home solar and cut tailpipe emissions to zero. But Budge said reliability remained “the big one”.
“We’ve been working on a 1958 Corvette recently, it looks amazing, stands out – just a horrible car to drive,” he said. “Yeah it’s got a V8, but that V8 had 100 horsepower when new, then it’s got a three-speed manual with no synchromesh. We’ve seen this with people who are like, ‘I’d love my kids to drive this car or these cars, but they won’t, because they don’t know what a choke is, they don’t want to change non-synchromesh gears’.
“We’ve got one Kombi in a beach house in Lorne and it means that three generations of family can drive it, which just wasn’t the case up a steep hill in Lorne with the original engine and brakes and everything.”
Removing what is often considered the beating heart and soul of a classic vehicle might not make sense on the surface, but having switched their classic to EV, many owners drive them a lot more and can see the return on investment, said Budge.
“Most of our customers, even when they didn’t intend to use it as their daily driver, have now used their Jaunt as their main car, whatever that is,” he says. “Fifties Land Rovers and whatever doing crazy amounts of kilometres because it’s the most fun car they have. And why not? Why not drive it? You can enjoy that old car but with ease of use and it’s just fun; you still get the good times but you’re not having to be a car mechanic.”
For many would-be Jaunt customers, telling an irate Tesla owner your 1958 Land Rover isn’t erroneously parked in an EV charging space – as you plug it in – is all the ROI they need.
Dylan Campbell has been road-testing and writing about cars and the new-car industry since 2006. An independent motoring expert based in Melbourne, Dylan is a former Editor of Wheels Magazine, MOTOR Magazine and the TopGear Australia website.
