By Victoria Robbins | 01 July, 2026
SEMA Flashbacks
We’re just four months away from the annual SEMA Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. In the past few years we have seen the number of electric vehicles showcased at the event grow to a noticeable chunk of the floor space. This got me thinking about one of our favorite e-swapped vehicles; Kevin Erickson’s Tesla-swapped Plymouth Satellite.
If there is one sure-fire way to start an argument among muscle-car people, it is to take a classic Mopar and remove the V8.
If you’d really like to see things get interesting, replace that V8 with a Tesla drivetrain.
That’s exactly what Kevin Erickson did with his 1972 Plymouth Satellite, a car appropriately named Project Electrollite.
The GearHeadTour crew first caught up with Kevin and the car at the 2021 SEMA Show in Las Vegas, where we got a chance to crawl around the Satellite and have Kevin show us exactly what goes into turning a classic Plymouth B-body into an electric muscle car.
And no, this wasn’t accomplished by simply dropping a Tesla motor into the engine bay and calling it a day.
Kevin, a cargo pilot and lifelong Mopar guy, had been working on cars long before Electrollite came along. His first car was a 1969 Dodge Dart GT that he bought as a teenager and continued modifying over the years.
When he got the Satellite, the original plan was much more traditional: build a modern Hemi-powered Mopar.
Then Kevin had another idea.
Tesla swap.
We’re sure that sentence alone just caused several Mopar purists to clutch their Pentastar T-shirts in distress.
Building Project Electrollite
Kevin used major components from a Tesla Model S, including its Large Sport Drive Unit and rear subframe. The approximately 100-kWh battery pack was separated into modules and distributed throughout the Plymouth, with batteries located both under the hood and in the rear of the car.
So when you open the hood expecting to see a 440, Hemi or even an LS swap—heaven forbid—you instead find batteries.
Lots of batteries.
Installing the Tesla rear subframe also created an interesting engineering problem. There wasn’t enough room to simply use a conventional rear suspension setup, so Kevin designed and fabricated a pushrod-style cantilever rear suspension.
That’s where this car becomes much more interesting than simply being “an old car with a Tesla motor.”
Kevin wasn’t installing a conversion kit.
He was figuring out how to make two vehicles designed roughly half a century apart work together.
The completed car has a slight rear weight bias of approximately 45 percent front and 55 percent rear, which certainly doesn’t hurt when all of that electric torque arrives essentially the instant you press the accelerator.
600-Plus Horsepower Without the Noise
At the time we saw Electrollite at SEMA, the car was producing roughly 600 horsepower. Later versions of the combination have been reported at around 636 horsepower.
Performance isn’t exactly a problem.
The Satellite has been capable of running the quarter mile in the low-12-second range, with later testing putting the car at roughly three seconds from 0–60 mph.
All without a carburetor, headers, exhaust system or a particularly good reason to stop for premium fuel.
Depending on charge level and driving conditions, Kevin has also reported roughly 250 to 300 miles of driving range, making Electrollite much more than an experimental show car.
He actually drives it.
That may be one of the things we like most about this build.
It’s Still a Hot Rod
It’s easy to turn Electrollite into an argument about electric cars.
But that’s really missing the point.
Hot rodding has always been about taking whatever technology is available and figuring out how to make a car faster, better or simply more interesting. Somebody once decided that a Ford flathead needed three carburetors. Somebody else decided a Willys coupe needed a supercharged Hemi.
Kevin Erickson looked at a Tesla drivetrain and a 1972 Plymouth Satellite and apparently thought:
Yeah. Those should probably be the same car.
We’re glad he did.
Since our visit with Kevin at the 2021 SEMA Show, Electrollite has done more than sit under show lights. Kevin has raced the car, driven it regularly and continued developing it. The Satellite competed at Holley High Voltage, where Kevin won his bracket on the final day of the event, and it later earned Best Coupe at Electrify Showoff in Austin.
So whether you’re an EV fan, a die-hard Mopar traditionalist, or somewhere in between, Electrollite is worth a closer look.
You don’t necessarily have to agree with putting a Tesla drivetrain into a classic Plymouth.
But you have to admit it’s a lot more interesting than another small-block swap.
Watch our GearHeadTour interview with Kevin Erickson from the 2021 SEMA Show for a close-up look at Project Electrollite, including its battery placement, suspension, Tesla rear subframe and some of the engineering Kevin had to figure out to make the whole thing work.
And be sure to subscribe to the GearHeadTour YouTube channel for more unusual builds, classic cars, shop tours and automotive stories from SEMA and beyond.
