OK, serious question time here: Is there anything that folks won't swap a Hayabusa engine into? Because honestly, it doesn't really seem like it at this point.
We've seen a strange VW Caddy hybrid Hayabusa contraption. There is, of course, the bonkers 1970s Comuta Car Hayabusa build. And very recently, we introduced you to MilkJug 2.0, which is a Hayabusa-swapped Smart ForTwo. Oh, and that last one is also turbocharged, because simply swapping in a Hayabusa engine on its own just wasn't quite mad enough. (Time to twist itself into a pretzel through sheer torque figures in 3, 2....)
This time, the Hayabusa swap in question is a little bit different. The guys at Grind Hard Plumbing Co. recently traveled across the country to retrieve a pretty rare vehicle: an ElectraMeccanica Solo car. It's a strange little three-wheeled EV, made by a tiny Canadian company based in Vancouver, British Columbia.
For those unfamiliar, ElectraMeccanica issued a voluntary recall for all 429 of the Solo cars it had ever made and sold back in February 2023. The reason: The electric motor inside could randomly shut down and cease working with no warning, which is kind of a safety issue. So the company recalled all of them, and most were returned and destroyed.
Most; but not all. The one that the GHCP guys retrieved, for example, was apparently stolen and then later sold at auction. And that's how they got their hands on one of the few remaining Solo cars in existence in 2024.
The logic is pretty sound: Swap out the potentially faulty EV motor and use the shell to house an entirely different power train. Sure, you might be introducing a set of completely different problems to your world, but that's a problem for tomorrow-you. What could possibly go wrong?
This video doesn't contain the entire build, but it does contain the process they went through for starting to take the Solo apart, as well as building what honestly looks like a pretty sweet subframe and engine mounts to position the Hayabusa engine in the rear of the vehicle. Seriously, those engine mounts that Will CADs up and cuts out are quite nice to look at. If they work as nice as they look, it's gonna be sick when it's done.
If you're curious to see what the Solo car was like to drive before they began the Hayabusa swap project, there's also a nearly hour-long video about driving the thing back home after they successfully purchased it.
