Watching Neil Young work on stage is a must have ticket, but watching Neil Young working on his Lincvolt project is another experience all together.
Lincvolt is the next project from Shakey Pictures. Young, together with his team including Adelaide resident Uli Kruger and mechanic Johnathan Goodwin as well as Will Mitchell, L.A. Johnson and Elliot Roberts, have been working to make what is affectionately known as the “yank tank” environmentally friendly.Together, they are transforming the engine of a 1959 Lincoln Continental Mk IV convertible into a new series hybrid system.
Will Mitchell contacted Undercover to tell us to tell you, “Thought that you and your readers might be interested in what we are up to. We have a live webcam set up here in the shop while the car is being worked on and are also streaming live webcasts from time to time with real time action from the car.
“Neil’s whole thing is big people and a big country need a big car”, L.A. Johnson told Undercover during his recent visit to Adelaide. “If we can get a car to do 100mpg what is the difference? Why have a little car that weighs nothing that you can hardly get into? It is not about size, it is about efficiency,”
“Some of the experimenting we are doing is building this engine that is going to have a turbine on it,” he said. “It is going to generate the power to generate the battery, but there is a guy in Adelaide who has found a way to eliminate batteries which is a whole other thing”.
Once they finish in the shop, “the plan is to drive the car to Detroit where the car was made originally,” he says. “We are going to take the car back to the empty shutdown plant where it was born. The car goes back to its homeland, then it goes back to Wichita and then Neil and I will drive it on the same road we drove it from San Francisco to Wichita back on Route 66.”
Lincvolt may just be a revolutionary concept for the automobile industry and Neil Young could very well be the driving force who gives the environment a boost while maintaining the cultural heritage of the classic American automobile. “It is a proof of concept that we can make a big car that can get great efficiency and get good mileage, beyond our wildest dreams is what Neil is going for,” he says. “We have already talked to motor companies and they are very interested if we can do this.”
Click in here to watch them at work via webcam. (The workshop is in Wichita, Kansas, so keep that in mind if you find nobody home).
There is also an active Lincvolt website and YouTube channel.
Click here for the Lincvolt website.
Click here for the YouTube channel
