"Ever since I was a kid I have wanted to build my own car. I was really into electric RC cars and spent a lot of my free time building them from kits and even from scratch.    Twenty years later I am a designer by trade with a degree in architecture, though most of my work has been in computer animation and multimedia programming for educational products and websites.   After watching shows like 'American Chopper' and 'Monster Garage' with my kids I was inspired to actually build something on my own. About the same time I came across an article about this laptop battery engineer who had built a car he called ‘The Tesla’ and I knew I wanted an electric sports car and began rolling over designs in my head.

The EV GT-40 started 2 years ago when I found an unfinished 1968 Valkyrie kit car- a GT-40 lookalike- for sale on eBay that was only 30 miles away from my home.  I was fed up with gas prices and the Middle East wars, and from my experience with electric RC cars I knew I could make my own electric car.  Doing some research on the Internet I found that there actually were a lot of guys who were converting cars and the parts were easily available.  It seemed like a whole movement of converting cars into electric was starting to finally take off: like a whole new ‘hot rod’ movement but with electric motors instead of v-8s!

Since I had never built a car before, it took a lot of research and learning a lot of new skills, but in the end it was worth it.  I now take the car to car shows and green environment shows to let people know that electric propulsion for a car is very viable and there is another way than gas- which has cost us so much in both dollars, the environment, and lives defending foreign oil. It is the younger kids I hope to inspire the most and I love seeing the excitement in their faces when they look at the car and I can see they truly understand it.

The EV GT-40 was a learning experience for me as a designer and I have already begun work on a new electric car design from what I learned. With new battery technology coming onto the market I really look forward to the possibilities of new electric cars in the near future.  See my website at www.evmania.com."