This is my favourite version of Project X, a screen capture from the movie Hollywood Knights. Tony Danza drove the car, and it featured Cragars, paint inside the trim instead of that white/silver wallpaper stuff, and more motor than any hood would dare try and cover.
Chevy made it to be a platform for testing new parts and combinations of them. Back in 1965, it was a cheap car that didn’t weigh that much and had room to fit a big engine up front. Over the years, the 57 Chevy, in general, has become somewhat of an icon, and aftermarket support for those cars is incredible. Six-cylinder, eight-cylinder, big block, small block, LS, you name it. If your car isn’t rusty, you probably don’t even need to own a welder to build a 57 Chevy today, the bolt-on aftermarket is that well-established. This year at SEMA, General Motors once again re-built Project X, this time as a full-electric vehicle.
What felt like a slap in the face to every fan of horsepower you can hear, General Motors went ahead and stuffed four-hundred volts under the hood of Project X. That’s right, volts, not horsepower. Honestly, I’d have been disappointed at four-hundred horsepower. In the past, it’s been more well equipped. How much horsepower does this little electric motor put out? Three-hundred and forty. However, itt puts it out from full-stop to infinitr, so I’m assuming it goes from overwhelming to underwhelming, the opposite of internal combustion. There’s no transmission, so to go from street-to-strip, they installed a quick-change rear end. There’s no exhaust and no fuel tank. Instead, there are seven hundred pounds of batteries out back.
They removed the trunk floor entirely to allow the battery tray to mount down between the frame rails where the fuel tank would normally be. Seven hundred pounds is a lot of weight, but it’s weight in the right part of the car, and apparently the amount up front is reduced drastically. The overall weight was roughly the same number despite the installation of more modern accessories like power steering and ABS. The electric motor up front is small, but there’s a ton of gadgets I never thought of that need to go in around it. First off, electrical devices put off heat, so there are three radiators up front to cool everything. Second, when an electric car isn’t moving, the motor isn’t turning, so there’s no accessory drive. The air conditioning has to be completely electric, as does the self-contained heater and pump. Any twelve-volt stuff runs off a conventional battery. There’s a lot more involved in this swap than just chain-hoisting out the old and dropping in the new, and there are two things that I either missed or omitted intentionally. The first is the range. How far can it go on a charge? The second is a photo of the inside of the trunk. Is it full to the lid with batteries, or is there plenty of room left for luggage? I may have missed it, as they also unveiled a 632 big block at the same event to distract guys like me. It makes one-thousand horsepower, and probably sounds obnoxious, just the way I like it.
Have a question or comment for Kelly? Post it at lmtimes.ca/kirk
