Hopefully you’ve met Rocco around Mozart’s some Friday morning, and maybe you caught his Show And Tell last summer:
Rocco’s company, Current EV Motors, converted his 1978 Ford F150 into a fully electric truck. Pretty cool, eh?
Rocco recently spoke at The Aspen Ideas Climate Solutions Showcase:
This great presentation weaves his family’s personal automotive story and the automobile’s industry’s history with his company’s strategy, patent portfolio, and opportunity.
- Rocco’s payload is well-designed, specific, actionable, in-progress, impact-driven, and hopefully quite lucrative.
- These strengths offer a stark contrast to all-too-typical empty wishcasting, here perfectly parodied by The Onion:
A December 2023 Popular Science profile helpfully dives deeper:
What Current EV is offering is more than a crate engine, Calandruccio says. His kit is instead engineered to bypass the transmission to improve the electric motor’s performance and efficiency. Instead of using a transmission to convert energy from the engine to turn the wheels, the motor is bolted directly to the axle.
“We’re focused on a bolt-on, all-inclusive solution for electrification,” he explains. “For this solution to be sustainable, it has to appeal to everyday mechanics and be safe, quick, and effective.”
Calandruccio’s marquee project is a 1978 Ford F-150 he named Gator for its signature green finish. A rolling example of what can be done when a solid mass-produced body meets an all-electric motor, Gator is one of about 10 million Ford trucks built between 1961 and 1978 on that chassis. That’s a key factor for Current EV, which plans to build kits in volume to bring the cost down. As a result, smaller conversion shops can complete projects in shorter amounts of time.
“We want this to be a solution that helps people in the EV industry see better margins and turn around more vehicles in their shops,” he says.
Calandruccio’s dream is for any mechanic or fleet maintenance staff to be able to swap out any gas-powered vehicle with a bolt-on kit. That’s the tipping point, he believes, toward larger-scale conversion rates.
“This Texas startup wants to rescue old gas-powered cars with simplified EV conversions“
CEV Motors has bolted its patented great ideas and engineering directly to the economic design of the industry and its impact in the world. That’s a clean and powerful business model.
Go, Rocco. Go.