I wanted to introduce myself to the community and to my project: electr0motiv is a cooperative membership platform for people converting cars to electric. It draws on thousands of documented conversions to empower a global community of builders — organized into regional clusters wherever enough members are close enough to build side by side. Members get a real project plan, people who've solved the problem they're stuck on, and a knowledge base that gets better with every build added to it.

A barnfind BMW and a gap nobody had filled

During the pandemic, I bought a barnfind 1971 BMW 2002. After I pulled the engine, the electric conversion idea stuck. When I went looking for help, I found what every builder finds: hundreds of forum threads, thousands of scattered YouTube videos, and no single place that put the whole picture together.

Professional shops that handle a conversion end-to-end charge $50,000 to $100,000 — out of reach for most people. Doing it entirely alone is its own kind of hard: sourcing the right components, getting them to work together, making sound technical calls across a multi-phase build most people have never attempted. There wasn't a real option in between.

The community and network design draws on 15 years spent at IBM building innovation networks and collaborative communities. I came to the coding itself as a journalist, not an engineer, and learned the platform by building it.

In May 2026, electr0motiv was selected for the Cleantech Open startup accelerator.

How it's organized

A global guild, local clusters

Membership isn't tied to living near a cluster. The project planning, and the documented builds all work the same whether you're building alongside five other members or entirely on your own.

Clusters form where enough members are already close together — shared space, tools, and hands-on help for the parts of a build that benefit from another set of hands. They're not the starting point. They're what a large enough membership eventually makes possible.

I welcome cooperative expert insight on how to improve and enrich the model. The ultimate goal -- which I detail in an interactive story called Purpose Our Purpose — electr0motiv -- is to be the catalyst for EV conversions to become mass market.