1 of 50? 1981 Ford Fairmont EV Wagon $750

Most of us have lived through at least one gas “crisis,” or if not an actual crisis, a period when prices went through the roof and availability sometimes was questionable. Companies would invariably rally around the notion of creating vehicles powered without direct gas and oil usage. This unusual 1981 Ford Fairmont EV Wagon is posted here on Facebook Marketplace in Lake Elsinore, California, and they’re asking $750. Here is the original listing. You guessed it, this is my tip!

While not an exciting car by most standards, I would love to have a manual-transmission Ford Fairmont wagon in plain ol’ Polar White with dog dish hub caps like this car, but maybe with a gas engine rather than around 18-22 lead-acid batteries. A modern buyer/owner could always convert this with a Nissan Leaf or Tesla battery pack and all the related goodies, which would make it an actual, somewhat practical commuter car, despite the ancient 45-year-old Fairmont suspension, brakes, etc. Hey, why not just upgrade those as well!

It’s only money, right? If you did a full-blow’d restomod to convert this old EV into a modern EV, along with a disc brake conversion, modern suspension, and all of those goodies, you’d still have less money into it than buying a used Tesla, and would have a sure hit at just about any Cars & Coffee-type events in the process. Along with learning a lot about battery-powered vehicles.

That’s typically how these cars get converted to battery power, by a college class or tech college engineering students, or something like that. In this case, this one was converted by, I believe, EVA: Electric Vehicle Associates out of Cleveland, Ohio. We saw a similar but nice example here on Barn Finds back in 2020. My favorite Ford Fairmont EV conversion was this sedan that we saw here on Barn Finds back in 2019, for a measly $1,000,000! The seller subsequently lowered the price to a mere (cough) $50,000 a couple of weeks later, and finally, in 2021, they were asking only $5,000. Ouch. You can see the manual shifter in this Fairmont wagon; that’s just cool, battery power or not. The manual came with Ford’s 2.3-liter four-cylinder, which is what this car must have been slated for originally.

A YouTuber could detail this car and make up the $750 asking price in literally four or five hours, and then keep making money on the video for years, so just for that, it would be fun to own. Some reports say that 40 of these conversions were done, and some say 50. As with 99.9% of everything on the internet, it’s subject to purposely fake information just for the fun of it, the analog equivalent of ringing someone’s doorbell, hiding in the shrubs, and chuckling when they answer the door and nobody is there. I have a long history of liking unusual early EVs, and this one is both unusual and early, so I like it.

This car was made for municipalities and other government agencies, and you can see a very faded and cracked US NAVY sticker on the front doors. Or, the passenger door, as sadly, the seller didn’t bother to take any photos of the driver’s side at all. The rear cargo area should be filled with 18 to 22 batteries, but a charger and some other 1980s technology are shown there in the photo above. Just for fun, here’s a 1981 Ford Fairmont brochure. These cars were typically sent to conversion companies as “bucks,” as in completed vehicles but without a drivetrain.

The “engine” is an electric motor powered by the missing batteries, sending power through the 4-speed manual to the rear wheels. At $750, this could be a fun weekend project to either get it working again with 800 pounds and $2,000+ (?) worth of batteries, convert it to a modern lithium-ion battery system, or drop a gas engine in there. Or just tow it to shows to let people know what folks in the 1980s thought the future might be like.