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Posted by Brajeshwar 16 hours ago

1966 Ford Mustang Converted into a Tesla with Working 'Full Self-Driving'(electrek.co)
164 points | 120 comments
sottol 14 hours ago|
I really like the look of the car, but from the title it sounds like a Mustang has been converted into an FSD Tesla ("teslafied" Mustang) - but Tesla suspension, Tesla interior... this smells like a Mustang body fitted onto a Tesla chassis ("mustangified" Tesla).

I suspect that this might be more of a "Mustang body kit" on a Tesla chassis and not retrofitting the Tesla tech into a Mustang chassis + body. Still cool, but maybe misleading.

RankingMember 12 hours ago||
Yep, that's exactly what it is. Still a cool project. For a split-second after reading the headline my brain thought they had gotten the Tesla software (with a lot of hackery) to control an ICE vehicle drive-train.
dylan604 10 hours ago||
For a split-second after reading the headline, I thought they were claiming FSD works.
Leonard_of_Q 9 hours ago|||
It does work in driving the car where it is able to. Where it fails is in the 'full' part. After 10 billion miles driven on 'auto-pilot' [1] it is hard to claim it 'does not work'. Tesla would have been better off removing the 'F' from 'FSD' but that's water under the bridge.

[1] https://electrek.co/2026/05/03/tesla-fsd-10-billion-miles-no...

protocolture 40 minutes ago|||
If they renamed it Featureless Sometimes Driving we might be onto something.
Dylan16807 1 hour ago||||
If we judge it as "Self Driving", it does the Driving part pretty well, and is quite bad at the Self part. There exist no roads and no weather conditions where I'm allowed to take my eyes off the road and stop being the safety nanny.
fouc 5 hours ago||||
I liked this article's definition of Full Self Driving (Level 4 autonomy), it is very clear - when Tesla directly takes on the legal liability for unsupervised driving.
omgwtfbyobbq 8 hours ago||||
The did, kind of. Instead of removing "Full", they added a disclaimer to the end.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a70420085/tesla-drops-auto...

simondotau 8 hours ago||||
Full is a relative term. Full compared to what? Compared to a professional rally car driver? Compared to my grandmother? Compared to a properly licensed tourist in a foreign country?

From videos I see on YouTube, I’m struggling to think what is not Full compared to—at a bare minimum—the bottom 10 percent of drivers on the road.

Dylan16807 1 hour ago|||
> From videos I see on YouTube, I’m struggling to think what is not Full compared to—at a bare minimum—the bottom 10 percent of drivers on the road.

Try sitting in the back seat or even just acting like a passenger and you'll see the difference very quickly.

jandrese 5 hours ago||||
For me it has a very specific meaning: "Full" means "Unsupervised and without a geofence". Anything less is not Full Self Driving.
bluGill 6 hours ago||||
Nobody admits they're in the bottom 10%. Nobody even admits they're in the bottom 75%.
parineum 6 hours ago|||
"Full" in full self-driving is a superfluous modifier. But it does is further emphasize that, what a person would consider "self-driving", it can do. Except it can't, of course.
dylan604 9 hours ago||||
You just said "where it fails" and then state hard to claim it not working. If you call it Full Self Driving and it doesn't fully self drive, then it doesn't work. Not really sure where the confusion is. It's not water under the bridge. It is what it is. They claimed it would be fully self driving and not some lane/speed maintenance that pretty much all car makers can do now. It was straight up explained to drive the car. Any deviation from that means it is not working and people like you willingly accepting what Musk has lied about for years trying to make the rest of us out to be the weird ones for not falling for it. I'm tired of the gaslighting.
goosejuice 8 hours ago||
> lane/speed maintenance that pretty much all car makers can do now

What car can I buy in the US today that's as good as the latest fsd?

Sohcahtoa82 7 hours ago|||
Literally every non-budget brand (and even some of the budget brands) offers automatic lane keeping with traffic-aware cruise control somewhere in their fleet. It might only be on their flagship vehicles, and possibly only on the top trims, but you're living in a Tesla-decorated cave if you think those are still Tesla-only features.

On a Tesla, it's not even an FSD-specific feature. Autopilot does it.

goosejuice 6 hours ago||
FSD isn't basic ADAS. You could just say no.
dylan604 7 hours ago|||
So many cars come with lane assist and adaptive cruise control. You can google those terms for yourself. I don't bother with lmgtfy requests. You're a big boy/girl, and teaching you to fish it much better effort. They also don't cost an additional $10k on top of the price of the car. They are just part of the price of the car.
scottyah 7 hours ago||
Maybe the lmgtfy would be a good exercise for you. Ford's BlueCruise, GM's SuperCruise, Rivian's Autonomy+, and Mercedes-Benz’s Drive Pilot all cost money.
goosejuice 6 hours ago|||
Indeed and none of those work outside of (select) highways. Lucid also has DreamDrive, but it's fairly poor from what I've seen. BYD's God's Eye is in the news, and it isn't looking good either.

I'd love to see good competition in this space, but it seems Tesla has a healthy moat.

dylan604 4 hours ago|||
Maybe re-reading what I wrote would help you lmgtfy.
pengaru 9 hours ago||||
even my 95 miata drives itself on a straight flat road...
mikestorrent 7 hours ago||
but unlike the Tesla, the Miata is a car designed for the delight of the driver, rather than as a futuristic driving appliance / infotainment centre.
bdangubic 7 hours ago|||
if they replaced F with S (Somewhat) all would be swell (hard to make any sales when not lying though…)
cebert 7 hours ago||||
I have FSD in a 2026 Model Y and it does a solid job for me.
fortran77 7 hours ago||||
I was 100% FSD today. Went to the office, ran some errands, went home. Never touched the steering wheel once. 2026 Model S Plaid.
Spooky23 8 hours ago|||
It works, it just doesn’t fully drive by itself.
fragmede 13 hours ago|||
> The team grafted three sections of the 2024 Tesla Model 3’s floor and seats into the Mustang’s body, shortening the battery case to fit without altering the car’s original dimensions. The result is a classic Mustang shell sitting on top of a Model 3 dual-motor setup
firecall 8 hours ago||
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public_void 13 hours ago||
I used to work at a company that did self driving. The sensor setup was more complicated than Tesla (cameras, lidar, etc), but the fact that FSD can still work on this car despite the cameras being in a different place is really impressive to me. Our sensors were pretty sensitive to accurate calibration, and iirc any time we tried to move our sensor array to a new car it took a ton of work to reconfigure it to make the sensor fusion output work.
Induane 12 hours ago|
This is one of the real advantages to the (often insulted and/or chastised) vision only approach to FSD.

People can easily adapt to different vehicles in a similar manner.

brk 10 hours ago|||
Most sensors can be implemented in a way that enables self-calibration.

I'm oversimplifying it here, but the macro process is taking some known attributes and mapping them to what you are observing. For example, if you can detect people, and you know the average height of a person, you can compute where your horizon is, and where you should (or shouldn't) expect to see people in the FOV. You can do this with cameras, lidar, etc. When you have multiple sensors you can do a lot more to have them all sample an object in their own ways and converge on agreement of where they are relative to each other and the object.

numpad0 53 minutes ago||||
Teslas require a camera calibration after windshield replacements, same as any cars
amluto 11 hours ago|||
I’m not sure this has much to do with vision as opposed to fancy self-calibration software. At least a few years ago, Tesla cars would be in self-calibration mode for a while after delivery while they calibrated their cameras. I think the idea is that it’s cheaper to figure out in software where everything is than to calibrate the camera mounts and lenses at the factory.

I see no reason that LiDAR couldn’t participate in a similar algorithm.

A bigger issue would be knowing the shape of the car to avoid clipping an obstacle.

omgwtfbyobbq 8 hours ago||
It probably could, but I imagine a LIDAR system would need a similar (large) amount of training data to enable effective self-calibration across a wide variety of situations.

At some point, with enough sensor suites, we might be able to generalize better and have effective lower(?)-shot training for self-calibration of sensor suites.

amluto 5 hours ago||
Isn’t the model needed rather similar to what’s needed for sensor fusion in general? If you can extract features from each sensor that you expect to match to features from a different sensor, then you can collect a bunch of samples of this sort of data and then use it to fit the transformation between one sensor’s world space and another sensor’s world space.
AngryData 14 hours ago||
From the article it sounds like the inverse, they took a Tesla and stuck a classic car exterior shell on it, not transplant the electric car parts into a mustang frame. It is still kind of neat but is not the same thing to me. You don't normally upgrade a classic car by chopping out the entire frame and sticking the body panels onto a modern car.
tracker1 8 hours ago|
I'd love to see more of this as an option... Getting a modern electic car with a late 60's Camero styled shell would be a nice option IMO. Would need to take a few liberties with some dimensions in the designs as the originals won't 1:1 match up, but there's probably enough leeway to make such things work out.
brrrrrm 6 hours ago||
I agree fully. Hyundai has a mockup that starts to get there (different era, but same concept) called the N vision 74[1], but I doubt we'll see it in market anytime soon. The unfortunate reality IIUC is that modern cars (electric vehicles) have certain aero restrictions (for mileage) that heavily limit design options.

[1] https://www.hyundai-n.com/en/models/rolling-lab/n-vision-74

ryan42 14 hours ago||
Here's one of a fully custom Toyota 4x4 truck getting a Tesla Model 3 motor that I enjoyed. I would love to have a small electric pickup like this, but I don't want to invest $100k to get it done

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siEhd4Z-6Ts

matthewfcarlson 10 hours ago||
I check multiple times a year for a small electric truck. Plenty announced but none you can actually buy year after year
205guy 35 minutes ago|||
Another candidate that I hope isn't vaporware: https://www.telotrucks.com/
tracker1 8 hours ago|||
Hoping the Slate makes it... for that matter, would be nice if the Scout does as well.
sarmasamosarma 13 hours ago||
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SoftTalker 11 hours ago||
It would be cool if we saw the separation of drivetrain from body in the automobile market. This happens with heavy trucks, you can buy a "glider" which is a completely new, finished rolling chassis and you provide your own engine. Originally done (I think) to skirt emissions laws but it would be cool to be able to buy the body and the EV drivetrain (and maybe battery packs?) from different vendors, and for EV drivetrains to be more easily fittable to older chassis.
Cockbrand 11 hours ago||
This was very common in the early days of the automobile, at least for luxury cars. Bentley or Rolls-Royce would deliver a chassis with the entire drivetrain, and a coachbuilder like Mulliner would add a body to the customer's liking.
jordanb 5 hours ago|||
One cool thing about commercial vehicles is that the CAN bus is all open-spec and fully documented. This is because fleet operators expect to be able to put their own aftermarket components on the bus and manufacturers have to support that.
kylegordon 9 hours ago|||
The team sat Electric Classic Cars are doing that, you can soon buy a skateboard chassis and drivetrain from them, and bolt whatever body you want to it.

Their recent videos showcase what they're doing in that area https://www.youtube.com/@ElectricClassicCars/videos

yieldcrv 11 hours ago||
that's what Waymo is doing, in their implementation of this idea the "waymo driver" is software intended to be licensed out to vehicles or vehicle chassis with applicable hardware

so if you thought the waymo car rollout was fast and sudden, wait until companies no longer need their own training data, it'll be like a switch got flipped

jerlam 10 hours ago||
Tesla has also offered their FSD to other companies, with no takers: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-fsd-licensin...

However, Tesla hasn't achieved anywhere near the autonomy of Waymo, so that may be the main sticking point.

yieldcrv 3 hours ago||
nobody trusts non-lidar except tesla buyers
kleiba2 27 minutes ago||
OMG, that steering wheel is just hideous!
deckar01 1 hour ago||
That Vagabond Builds video... They edited it, but left in a claim it had a frunk. The commentary felt like engagement optimized stream of consciousness blather. They cut out shots of the car being moved and never showed it being driven.
condiment 14 hours ago||
This sort of conversion gets coverage every once in a while and it's been neat to see old frames getting chopped onto new electric drivetrains. I spoke with one of the people interviewed in this article[1] a couple years back about converting an old truck I have sitting around into an EV.

The Model 3 approach takes their unified rear axle (motor,axle,wheels) and mounts it into an existing frame. Then you just need to find a place to stuff the batteries, retrofit some high-voltage electronics, and you're off to the races. One of the drawbacks of that approach is that it changes the stance of the vehicle, but for this Mustang that doesn't seem to matter much - it still looks classic.

Other converters either go for the high end with a model S and fit the motor into a traditional drivetrain for a sleeper build, or they go for the low end and take an old forklift motor and batteries and build what is effectively a street-legal golf cart. Prices range from $5-100k depending on your level of DIY and how dangerous of a classic car you want on the other side of the process.

[1] https://coloradosun.com/2023/06/25/classic-cars-electric-veh...

hnav 14 hours ago||
Retro-electric stuff makes so little sense since it's the worst of all worlds. Part of why Teslas get decent range is the slippery body. I wince every time I see people clamoring for the VW Scout reboot. Rivian too with their 140kwh batteries just to give people that nostalgic body-on-frame SUV look with usable range.
saratogacx 13 hours ago||
You don't take on projects like this because you're on a mission to make the most efficient vehicle. Lots of people are paid good money to do that and produce the slip-slugs we have today.

A project like this is to have a fun experience in a vehicle that was never designed to drive with electric qualities. I don't need the most efficient vehicle for my use so I could afford to trade some of that for fun. I'd probably try a Subaru Impreza STi because it would just be a blast to have a car of that size and stature with an electric powerplant under the hood (or trunk, or wherever it fits)

hnav 13 hours ago|||
90% of the STi's charm is the drivetrain. How would a hacked up STi differ from a model 3?
saratogacx 11 hours ago||
Mainly size and driving position. The charm of the AWD and live adjustments would need to be kept around but even without the ol turbo you'll still have a small, nimble, darty car to toss around. Something would be lost in the conversion but balancing turbo lag isn't the entire car. The Model 3 is long, wide, with a big wheelbase compared to, especially the older, STi's.
hnav 11 hours ago||
I wouldn't call STIs darty. They're nose heavy and need heavy coaxing with the left foot to rotate. The big wheelbase in the Model 3 is a fair point though. Apparently there are TC/DSC defeat devices and mechanical LSDs available for them now, so I'd expect Model 3s to be rallied more and more as they age out.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5 hours ago|||
> slip-slugs

That's a good one. I'm partial to David Frieberger's "mobility blobs".

_fizz_buzz_ 1 hour ago|||
It makes sense just like 22 people kicking a ball around a field makes sense. I repair electronics as hobby. This past week I repaired my daughters $15 toy tablet. It took me a few hours to do that. Economically completely unjustifiable. This is probably the only way to look at this project.
xbar 6 hours ago|||
Correct. Not sensible at all. Except so much more sensible than retro-petroleum stuff.

Watching my brother-in-law buy a 1971 Chevelle for his 16-year old daughter because she thought it looked cool only to have him sell it at a fat loss 3 months later because she couldn't choke down the gasoline fumes driving out of the school parking lot every day was instructive.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5 hours ago||
Sounds like the dude needs to learn how to fix exhaust leaks.
userbinator 1 hour ago||
Or tune the engine correctly. Probably has an off-the-shelf "performance" carb that's set much richer than it should and a "full race" cam that only makes sense for a track car, giving horrible fuel economy and actually less low-end power.

My daily driver is roughly as old, has a 400 V8 with a 4-barrel, idles so quietly I've had passengers surprised that the engine was running, and gets around 20-25mpg if I resist the urge to open it up all the way.

e44858 12 hours ago|||
From the article:

> it achieves 258 Wh/mi — roughly matching the efficiency of an actual Model 3.

KaiserPro 9 hours ago|||
> Retro-electric stuff makes so little sense since it's the worst of all worlds.

old cars are bastards to drive. I have a softspot for a mark 2 VW golf. But its not fast, the steering is heavy and the brakes are utterly shite.

However, if I had the time and money, I would totally electrify a golf. it would be zippy quiet and hilarious to drive, especially without any kind of traction control.

However it would be fun.

Basically its like vinyl. It is a demonstrably worse format than anything digital(and other analogue formats), however it looks great. Sure you get lots of audiophiles waffle on about "warmth" and shit, but its all lies. they either like it because its how they think things should sound, or it looks cool. It is not a purer warmer sound.

same with backyard steam engines. useless but fucking cool

hnav 9 hours ago|||
Wouldn't it be easier to get a Mk2 GTI and put some decent tires, shocks and pads on it? Steering being heavy just means you have to avoid steering at a standstill which can be fun in itself since you're actively working to be more fluid.
tass 9 hours ago|||
Vinyl, for whatever continuing reason, often does sound better than digital formats but only because it’s mastered with more care.

It could be that it’s physically impossible to master vinyl for extreme loudness, but whatever the reason is you can absolutely pick up a vinyl copy of an album and find it sounds much better than the streamed or CD version.

tencentshill 10 hours ago|||
EVs are still far more efficient than any combustion engine per unite of energy. It doesn't have the density of gasoline, but you're paying a lot less per mile driven no matter how boxy it is.
twothamendment 8 hours ago|||
I drive by an old Scout that just sits there and wish I had time to update it. It could be a fin project.
toast0 6 hours ago|||
I want to like the VW Scout, but it's so big compared to IH Scouts.
olyjohn 13 hours ago||
Okay so its not perfect as far as efficiency, but isn't it still significantly more efficient than whatever gas engine was in it before?
rootusrootus 14 hours ago|
That's really cool, though I confess I would have preferred the interior to have been more Mustang and less Model 3. Just a quibble, though, the effort is fantastic.
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