A 1972 Plymouth Satellite Lost Its V8 to a Tesla — Then Humbled a 700-HP Turbo Dodge Dart

Kevin Erickson spent nearly two years swapping a wrecked Tesla Model S drivetrain into his 1972 Plymouth Satellite — and the 636-horsepower result just put a 700-HP turbo Dodge Dart on notice at the strip. Here’s how a home-garage build called ‘Electrollite’ pulled off one of the most convincing EV muscle car swaps yet.

Kevin Erickson did not set out to make Mopar purists nervous. He just wanted to find out what would happen if he pulled the factory 318 out of his 1972 Plymouth Satellite and dropped in a complete Tesla Model S drivetrain instead. What happened was a 636-horsepower sleeper that hits 60 mph in roughly three seconds, runs the quarter-mile in the low 12s, and — according to the video that has now pulled in nearly a million views — walked away from a 700-horsepower turbocharged Dodge Dart without burning a drop of gasoline. Erickson calls his creation “Electrollite.” Everyone else is starting to call it proof that the EV swap has graduated from novelty act to genuine threat.

The Build Nobody Expected From a Home Garage

The video comes from That Racing Channel, which caught up with Erickson to walk through the build and then put the finished car on the strip against a turbocharged Dodge Dart running serious boost. The footage doesn’t shy away from the obvious tension in a story like this: a lot of classic Mopar fans see a gutted engine bay and a missing small-block and assume the car has been ruined. Erickson’s response is to just drive it, hard, and let the timeslip do the talking instead of arguing the point.

What makes the story land is how unglamorous the build actually was. Erickson is not a trained electrical engineer, and he didn’t start the project with a shop full of fabrication equipment. By his own account the build took close to two years of nights and weekends, much of it spent solving problems that no classic-car shop manual ever anticipated — like figuring out where to put a rear suspension once the Tesla subframe leaves no room for the Satellite’s original setup. He ended up templating a pushrod suspension out of cardboard and screwdrivers before he ever committed to cutting metal, a detail that shows up again and again in viewer comments as the thing people respect most about the project. It is the kind of trial-and-error problem-solving that separates a backyard build from a check-written-at-a-shop build, and it’s a big part of why the video has resonated well beyond the usual EV-conversion crowd, pulling in comments from die-hard carburetor enthusiasts who admit they never expected to root for an electric motor at the dragstrip.

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Why the Satellite Was the Right Canvas for This

The Plymouth Satellite doesn’t get the spotlight that the Barracuda, the GTX, or the Road Runner do, but it was a legitimate player in Chrysler’s B-body muscle lineup through the late 1960s and early 1970s, sharing its platform with those more famous siblings while carrying a noticeably more understated personality. By 1972, muscle car horsepower across Detroit was already sliding under the weight of tightening emissions rules and rising insurance premiums, which is part of why a tired, low-output Satellite like Erickson’s made such a logical donor car in the first place — there was no numbers-matching 440 or Hemi heritage being sacrificed here, just a mid-size Mopar that had long since lost whatever factory punch it originally had.

That’s also exactly why the EV-swap movement has gravitated toward cars like this one rather than toward genuinely rare survivors. Pulling a drivetrain out of a documented, high-dollar muscle car invites outrage from collectors; doing the same thing to a plain-Jane Satellite that was never going to command serious money on its own invites curiosity instead. Erickson’s project, run under his own EV Muscle Cars LLC banner, has become one of the more visible examples of a broader trend of builders raiding wrecked Teslas for their drive units and dropping them into classic American steel — chasing a kind of retro-futuristic sleeper that neither the EV world nor the traditional muscle car world was quite ready for when these builds first started showing up online.

It also helps explain why reception to this specific build has skewed so much warmer than the usual internet reflex against “ruining” a classic. The restomod world has spent decades normalizing the idea that swapping in a modern drivetrain can make an old body shell better rather than lesser — LS-swapped Novas and Fox-body Mustangs with coil-overs are old news at this point. Erickson’s car simply asks collectors to extend that same logic one step further, from a modern V8 to a modern electric motor, and a surprising number of them seem willing to make that leap once they see the timeslip.

The Numbers That Make Gearheads Do a Double-Take

The swapped-in unit is a Tesla Model S rear drive motor running in Ludicrous mode, paired with a roughly 100-kWh battery pack, and it’s commonly cited at around 636 horsepower — delivered the way electric motors deliver it, which is to say instantly, with no turbo lag, no torque converter slip, and no shift shock to interrupt the pull. Erickson has logged 0-60 times in the low three-second range and quarter-mile passes in the 12-second bracket, numbers that would have been unthinkable for a Satellite of this era no matter which engine Chrysler had bolted under the hood back in period.

The weight distribution is one of the quieter details that keeps coming up in viewer reaction: with the heavy battery pack and drive unit repositioned low and toward the rear, the car reportedly sits close to a 55/45 front-to-rear split, which is a big part of why it launches as cleanly as it does off the line. None of this came out of a bolt-in kit. Erickson engineered the motor mounting, the custom suspension geometry, and the electronics integration largely on his own, which is the detail That Racing Channel leans on hardest in the video — this isn’t a shop build with a six-figure budget behind it, it’s one determined owner working through a wrecked Tesla, a tired Mopar, and a very long list of problems he had no choice but to solve himself. Viewers who identify themselves as engineers in the comment section seem especially floored by that part, repeatedly calling the from-scratch electronics integration the hardest part of the whole project to pull off without formal training.

What the Matchup Against the Dart Actually Proves

The drag strip pairing with a turbocharged Dodge Dart is the hook that got this video in front of a much bigger audience than most EV-conversion content ever reaches, and it works precisely because it inverts expectations twice over. A turbo Dart pushing 700 horsepower is itself a sleeper in the traditional sense — a humble compact hiding serious boost under an unassuming shell. Watching a converted family-sedan-turned-muscle-car lose that particular game of expectations to an electric Satellite is the kind of result that makes both camps pay attention, whether they want to or not.

It’s also why the comment section under the video reads less like a culture-war flame war and more like genuine respect, even from viewers who say outright that they’re “a gasoline engine guy through and through.” Erickson built something that doesn’t ask anyone to abandon their preferences; it just asks them to watch the timeslip. For a hobby built on bragging rights at the strip, that’s a pretty persuasive argument no matter what’s spinning the rear wheels — and it may be a preview of how a lot more of these arguments get settled in garages across the country over the next decade.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.