Picture a vintage mid-60s Ford Mustang. Now, imagine the sound that it makes. You can almost hear the rumble of its engine — a quality it shares with a certain generation of muscle cars. But what if the Mustang in front of you emitted a gentle hum rather than a loud rattle? In that case, you might be thinking of a real-life experiment in combining a classic car’s exterior with the inner workings of a modern EV — specifically, one from Tesla.
In an article for Electrek, Fred Lambert has more details on how this unexpected restomod came to be. The person behind the alterations has a better understanding than most people of vehicles’ inner workings. That would be one Yaro Shcherbanyuk, the proprietor of Calimotive Auto Recycling, a company that specializes in parts for Rivian and Tesla vehicles. Lambert reports that Shcherbanyuk purchased the 1966 Mustang in 2022 and spent the next two years modifying it — a process that included emabling Tesla’s Full Self-Driving feature.
On Calimotive’s Instagram, Shcherbanyuk has extensively documented the process of rebuilding the Mustang with Tesla components. As Electrek reports, that process also led to some changes from his original plan — notably, realizing that a Model 3 drivetrain would fit in with the Mustang’s body better than the Model S drivetrain he had originally considered. The total cost of the project? Around $40,000.
Inside the World of High-End Restomods
An excerpt from Bill Schwartz’s “Restomods: The New World Order of Handcrafted Cars”Lambert points out that the implications of this restomod go beyond the unlikely synthesis of two very different vehicles: it also exists as a proof of concept that Tesla’s self-driving systems can be used on another vehicle, which theoretically opens the door for licensing opportunities. This Mustang isn’t the only vintage car with added Tesla technology: in 2020, a Rolls-Royce once owned by Johnny Cash was reimagined with Tesla engineering.
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