Everyone who has ever picked up an electric drill has wondered if it would be possible to use one to drive a car. Wait, you haven’t wondered that? Well I guess it’s just me and the Garage 54 hooligans. What if you had 50 drills? It makes sense for EVs to be powered by multiple electric motors, but what if each of those motors had its own battery and ran a common crankshaft via a series of complex pulleys and belts? Yes, this is a simple solution for the modern electric vehicle. No more wondering where the batteries will fit, you just have to put them inside the motor.
The average modern electric drill allegedly produces just shy of 1 horsepower and about 8 lb-ft of torque. With modern factories and globalized production, these Russian units are probably about equal to the power output of a Dewalt or Ryobi, but we’ll err a little on the conservative side. Let’s say we’re dealing with half a horsepower each for these black and orange machines, so about 25 horsepower, but still a pretty impressive 400-ish lb-ft of torque. That should be more than enough to move a little Lada around, especially when mated to a gearbox.
It’s safe to say that Garage 54’s little experiment here is in the interest of dumb fun. The batteries won’t provide any kind of reasonable range, and higher speeds don’t seem all that likely, but it should launch pretty well, and it makes for a cool YouTube video. The world needs more whimsy as we drop into 2025, so why not click the play button and watch some folks half a world away from you troubleshooting their electric drill engine?
It will certainly be interesting to see what happens when all of this gubbins is inserted into a car and they press the go pedal. It’s difficult to tell, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to throttle the inputs at the moment, it will be interesting to see what they use to control this, or if they’re just going to stick with an on-off switch and fuckin’ send it.
