Tony Hawk just posted a video to his Instagram about his beautiful 1964 Corvette Stingray whose original 327 V8 was yanked out and replaced with an electric motor. Naturally, the comments are filled with Corvette lovers — old and young, and old — shouting in disbelief that America’s skateboarding hero desecrated such a piece of classic sports car iron. Here are some of the most outraged commenters, and why they need to relax.
Tony Hawk’s EV-converted C2 Corvette really isn’t anything new. He gave Jay Leno a ride back in 2022. But yesterday Hawk published an Instagram video with the somewhat bait-y title “Dear Detroit: we good?”
It turns out, “we” are not good.
View this post on Instagram
Here are the most liked comments on Instagram. With 3,238 likes as of this writing, commenter fk8.e30 writes:
Damn the one tony hawk post I hate
With 2,078 likes we have this from someone named tingey:
Ruined a stingray bruh ????
With 1,947 like, we have this one from spiff_d:
Cool, I fucking hate it.
filipecouto88 sums up my feelings, and those of apparently 877 others:
I feel really uncomfortable.
With 770 likes, camdenblast wrote:
You ruined that car????♂️
Those are the most popular comments, and though there are plenty of positive ones as well, many of those 1,400 comments on that reel read similarly. Here are a few cherry-picked ones:
Are fucking kidding me Tony with your money you could’ve put an ls7 in it???? I pray a v8 finds its way back into this car jus genuinely a shameDefeated the purpose by making it electricIt’s OK to drive an electric car, but please stop ruining all the nice and rare classic cars!!I wanna see how long those electric motors last compared to that small block 327.Yeah sorry man this is a bit of an L. Love you Tony you can do no wrong but this…this is wrong ????Dude, but why.. the whole charm is gone. If you want electric then buy electric. Don’t desecrate history ????I’m gonna go vomit now. I’d never have thought I’d ever tell Tony Hawk that I was disappointed in him.Tony you are on of my hero’s, but bro, you ruined this classic. Just buy a Tesla and convert it to a convertible. I still love you Tony!Even the coolest guy ever did one thing that fucking sucks lolTony noooooooooooo ????????????This is a sin against that carTony bro I love you but for this you need to go
I could go on and on.
Really, none of this should be a surprise. The Corvette is typically beloved by older folks, and many of the Instagram comments came through Facebook, which is also beloved by older folks.
Still, to all you Corvette purists, I have good news. Back in February of 2022, I visited EV West and saw them dismantling Tony Hawk’s 1964 Corvette (see the original fuel tank, rear differential, and 327 V8 in the photo above). While receiving a tour of the facility, I was told by CEO Michael Bream something that made the car enthusiast inside me happy: All of EV West’s conversions are reversible.
Though we saw this Corvette on Jay Leno’s Garage years ago, it appears that perhaps it wasn’t complete, because Tony Hawk apparently just received the finished vehicle, over four years after I visited EV West. Here’s EV West’s recent writeup from LinkedIn:
This week we handed Tony Hawk the keys to his 1964 Corvette Stingray, the final delivery on one of the longest builds we have had on the board. The technical summary: the original 327 V8 and manual transmission came out, a Tesla small drive unit went in – roughly 300 horsepower through a single-speed rear-mounted setup, with a 41.6 kWh battery pack relocated to the front engine bay for around 120-140 miles of range depending on how heavy your right foot is. No body modification. Every original drivetrain component was boxed up and returned to the owner, so the car is fully reversible.
I texted Bream about the Corvette, and he made it clear: “We’re car fans, so the chassis is the most important thing.” This was extremely apparent when I visited EV West. The place is filled with car geeks, so they’re not the enemy, they’re friends.
Does it really matter that the build is reversible? I don’t know. Maybe after Tony Hawk kickflips into the next realm, the next person will prefer the car the way it came from the plant in St. Louis, with a V8 and stick. So at least they’ll have that option.
While I find celebrities who turn their car collections into EVs under the pretense that somehow it’s going to help the environment to be rather tiring, this doesn’t seem like that. This seems like Tony Hawk, a guy who likes the look of Corvettes but doesn’t like to wrench and doesn’t seem to care that much about engine sound or stickshifts, just making a car he loves a bit easier to live with on a day-to-day basis. I can respect that. And given its reversible nature, hopefully some of the outraged folks in the comments can, too.
I would love to convert my weak, noisy, smelly, shaky 50 year old Toyota to EV.
Good job, Tomás Halcón!
“I find celebrities who turn their car collections into EVs under the pretense that somehow it’s going to help the environment to be rather tiring…”
Really?
What have you got against anyone, regardless of motivation, giving inefficient, gross polluters new life by converting them to efficiently use energy from the sun – while also not sending more of their money to Big Oil and the Middle East to fund fascism and terrorism – with the bonus of not pumping more pollutants into the air for you and your son to breathe?
I find this type of reverse snobbery to be rather tiresome.
I’d rather see more celebrities and tastemakers putting their money where their mouth this way – with some creativity and style – rather than yet another newish AMG G-Class rolling cliché at the Century City Mall and CCA Valet lines.
Math. Math is what we have against the pretense of environmentalism in this case. The amount of resources burned, both literally and figuratively, to drop in new EV drivetrains into old cars vastly eclipses the very modest footprint of letting a collector car putter out it’s remaining days on it’s old ICE by going for a drive every week or so. If you want to do it because it’s cool or fun, then by all means do so! But don’t claim you’re helping the environment, because you’re not.
Oh, so an EV powertrain for a new car is just fine for the environment – but an EV powertrain for an old vehicle isn’t?
Or is this the old “EV powertrains are bad for the Earth” trope?
Let’s remember that the very wealthy often have more than a couple vehicles – most of which are seldom driven, but still require oil changes, fueling, etc, etc to stay in operable condition – whether they’re driven daily or monthly.
So if an EV powertrain for their vintage Mercedes, Porsche, Rolls or Corvette enables them to drive that oldster more frequently without all the mess, maintenance and bodily fluids – isn’t that a good thing?
(and I meant to say CAA valet lines – which can get quite long on certain days of the month…)
Unsure if actually ignorant or doing the “pretend not to understand and thus make discussion impossible” trope…
I’ll charitably assume the first and explain: things take resources to build, both materials and energy. In the case of a new drivetrain, especially an EV one, these resources are greater than an ICE one. in a new EV that will be driven solely on it’s EV drivetrain for the life of the vehicle, the net effect is a savings of energy and materials due to greater efficiency compared to an ICE drivetrain. This is the whole logic behind going to EVs in the first place.
But when you have a decades-old already built vehicle that has a perfectly functional drivetrain already installed, and is almost certainly not driven a whole lot, the net effect of swapping in a new EV drivetrain (because again that drivetrain took materials and energy to build) is that you will have burned more resources total than if you had just not swapped things in the first place. If you’re doing it because you want to do it, think it’s cool, whatever- that’s fine! Just don’t claim it’s for environmental reasons without a lot of math backing up that position, because it’s almost certainly a false claim.
I see your point about the use of resources to make something old continue running with a new drivetrain.
However some people don’t have the desire to keep a mechanic on call or deal with the search for out of stock/questionable reliability when new parts just to keep their old car running – or they don’t want to continue getting 12mpg for their weekend ride – so people make the change.
Meanwhile – where’s your dismissal of LS or Coyote conversions/restomods?
They too take a lot of resources just to make something as resource-dependent and inefficient, possibly even moreso, as before.
As far as I know no one is claiming an LS swap is good for the environment (though if it’s getting an old car with a non-functional engine running again, and you’re using that as your daily instead of buying new then it might be green). As I’ve said multiple times, if you’re doing it for kicks, that’s cool, go for it! This includes EV conversions as well. But virtue signalling about your greenie credentials when the math isn’t mathing is just hypocrisy.
I doubt the energy needed added up to much, especially if the motor and battery cells were salvaged.
Salvaged would be a much better story, though I have doubts any custom builder would use a salvaged battery, purely for the sake of liability if nothing else.
If the intent is *for the environment* recycling by salvage would be part of the message. They don’t say where they got the parts but given the motor came out of a Tesla S I think there’s a chance its a used or rebuilt unit. Same for the battery cells since the battery wasn’t a drop in but a custom job.
The way I see it if he owns it he can do whatever he wants to it.
I’m trying to form an opinion and I just can’t. 300hp Tesla motor with 1k lbs of batteries under the hood is underwhelming, but so is the drivetrain they removed. The whole thing is one big “who cares”. The best thing this car could do is ragebait Facebook commenters and it seems to be doing a stellar job there. I hope Tony likes it since it probably cost as much as my house.
I think Tony Hawk should smile more. And not dress like a tomboy. And I can’t believe he ruined his good looks with those tattoos!
-Mouth-Breathing Gatekeeper a.k.a. Impotent_Busybody1965@AOL.com
It’s reversible, so not upset.
C2 Corvettes aren’t exactly rare, so not upset.
Do I get it? No, not really.
It’s grrrrreat! Oh, wrong Tony. Still, I like the conversion.
The engine and transmission of these 60’s Corvettes aren’t really anything crazy to write home about. I highly doubt he converted a rare L88 or anything like that.
Alright, I don’t like that I’m siding with the haters, but Tony Hawk probably has fuck you money. Couldn’t he just buy a rolling chassis C2 and put the electric drivetrain on that? I’m okay with turning old cars into electrics but I’d rather that was done to something that was already dead/crashed/with a broken powertrain instead of converting a perfecly good unit.
At the end of the day though, it’s his car and his money.
But, but, range anxiety!!!
And, what was the cost to do this? Seem like an incredible waste of money unless there are a lot of ’64 Vettes needing new engines and trans.
However, creating a new EV that looks like a ’64 Vette,…
That’s surprisingly not much worse than the original 327 w/auto’s 10.5MPG and 20Gal fuel tank. It probably wouldn’t take much effort to run out of range with the original drivetrain in under 100 miles either.
People are surprised Tony Hawk would want his car to have more of a skateboard platform?
Bravo
Excellent!
The Venn diagram of Classic Corvette enthusiast and perpetually outraged grump probably has a lot of overlap. I bet a lot of that build time was spent getting rid of all the squeaks and rattles that became really annoying once the loud V8 wasn’t there to cover them up.
A lot of people just need to be reminded that this isn’t their car.
If they want an all-original version, or an LS7 swap, or whatever, they are welcome to buy their own and to do that.
Instead, people how don’t, or can’t, own one, want to keyboard-warrior what other people should do with theirs, based on the “purity”.
I know, K20 swap!
Gotta keep it domestic. 350 Diesel.
Northstar, baby!
The entire drivetrain from a Ford Fiesta. Purity!
If you mount it in the back so it’s driving the rear wheels it’s like a C2 and a C8 combined!
Well, uh, now you’ve taken my dumb idea and pushed it so far it’s actually extremely cool.
Thats the most sadistic thought I’ve heard in awhile. With the sheer size of the Northstar and all the issues they’ve had over the years…
A K20 4X4 GMC chassis is about as domestic as it gets. Like this, but with a C2 body.
This sort of Corvette-guy outrage is usually reserved for when that all-you-can-eat joint down the street from Costco cuts you off after your fourth trip to the pasta bar.
Corvette fans are the most annoying specific car fans, change my mind. That said I still want one. Should I buy the white New Balances before or after? Griffin Riley help me out here.
Porsche owners started getting as bad if not worse about 10 years ago, and once the C8 came out that silenced the most annoying of the Corvette fans or pushed them into their own bubble saying it’s not a real Corvette.
No need to buy New Balances. They are assigned to you automatically when you sign for the car.
Thank you, THIS is why I come to The Autopian!
I wouldn’t do this and find the idea rather silly, but for as iconic as it is, the C2 isn’t exactly rare. I don’t think this is something to get up in arms about.
I think the most amusing complaints are the ones that are simultaneously “you ruined a piece of history” and “you should have put a different gas engine in it.”
That is hilarious..
I mean, Corvette people are the one-of-one stereotype so I’m sure this C2 was the only black Stingray convertible made by someone left-handed on a Thursday afternoon or something.
The problem with the Internet is that every random nobody feels entitled to give you their opinion (this nobody included).
One could say the same about Tony Hawk.
I’m almost more baffled by people surprised at the responses they receive. Don’t say anything you don’t want critiqued.
I don’t think anyone is surprised by Instagram users having bad opinions.
At least in meatspace you can see the guy with the greasy hair, bad teeth, and stained waifu t-shirt and use that information to decide how much you want to pay attention to his opinions on engine swaps, political matters, or women’s health.
Fair
I agree, that is The Problem with the internet. There are no others. 🙂
I mean, it either had a 3-speed manual or a 2-speed automatic coupled to a wheezy carberted lump of a precambrian v8 that put out maybe as much power as a Honda Civic on a good day, assuming the WWII-era tolerances let it stay in tune longer than a week.
Now it doesn’t sound like warmed-over taco farts and can get out of its own way. It was either that or a generic LS swap, the automotive equivalent of white New Balance sneakers.
A very beautiful car now is as drivable as it is look-at-able.
Nothing Of Value Was Lost
It’s also probably faster than it would have been with an LS7.
I think the 64 had an available 4 speed. And possibly something like 350 hp. But im guessing this was likely a less spicy version of the 327.
Love it, sounds fun… and he got the attention he was looking for with his latest post.
Can anyone tell what version of the 327 this was from the picture?
It’s the 327 that would’ve come in a 1964 Corvette Stingray. 🙂
I think there were 2 or 3 different possible versions of the 327 that went into the 64 based on the engine code. Maybe even a fuel injected one.
Probably, the pictured one is definitely carbureted.
Maybe they’ll get over it, but they’ll never admit it. You admit you’re wrong online and it’s all over.
…I miss the message board era. It had problems too but nothing like the Algorithmized “Dead” Internet.
At least they didn’t cancel it because they thought he was fake 😛
No really tho, EV conversions have been popular on old classic rear-engine Porsches for a long time now, especially the 914.
That guy kinda looks like Tony hawk, I wonder what he’s doing these days?
That guy looks an awful lot like Tony Hawk.
Like the skateboarder?
I wonder what happened to him.
He took all his video game money, bought a classic car, and posted some rage bait.
Good for him. It is his car. He can do what he likes. Wanting to and liking wrenching is very different than having to. Respect.