A Royal Wedding Inspired This Startup to Electrify Iconic Cars Like the Porsche 911
The concept sounds simple: Take an iconic car, invest a lot of money, and transform it into a one-of-a-kind electric vehicle. That’s, in short, what U.K.-based Everrati Automotive is doing. Founded in 2019 by a former tech executive, the company blends craftsmanship and engineering know-how to deliver bespoke electric conversions for wealthy car enthusiasts.
Take Steve Rimmer, for example. The Seattle-based businessman hired Everrati to convert his Porsche 911 (Type 964) RSR into a high-performance EV—a project he hopes will keep the classic sports car on the road for many years to come. Rimmer says it was his wife and daughter’s passion for the environment that motivated him to spend nearly half a million dollars turning a German engineering icon into a car built for the 21st century.
“The 964 is a work of art in itself, but the team at Everrati managed to engineer it better than it was,” Rimmer told Observer. One of Everrati’s earliest customers, the aviation executive now drives the car several times a week to commute. “The performance is pretty compelling,” he said with a smile. (Porsche, for its part, has made significant investments in EVs in recent years, notably with its Taycan model. Still, the majority of Porsche’s lineup remains powered by gas.)
Rimmer fits Everrati’s customer profile perfectly: “people who have that love for tech and clean energy but at the same time want something that’s attractive and classic,” Everrati CEO Justin Lunny told Observer.
A royal wedding sparks a business idea
Before founding Everrati, Lunny spent most of his 30-year career in fintech and education. The inspiration for launching a company that turns classic cars into EVs? The 2018 wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. (Yes, really.)
“The vehicle they drove away from their wedding was an E-type Jaguar. But actually, it had been made fully electric by Rimac [the Croatian carmaker], so it was a Rimac powertrain in an E-type”, Lunny recalled.
That moment and the public’s enthusiastic reaction to the electric E-Type convinced Lunny there might be a market for giving classic cars a “future life.” He teamed up with Nick Williams, a former Daimler and Volkswagen executive, and launched Everrati. The name blends “forever” and “Rati,” the Hindu goddess of love, passion and desire. “It’s really describing the whole ethos,” Lunny said. “We’re not ruining [those iconic cars]. They are very much works of art that we want to see on the road for, hopefully, generations to come.”
Based in the heart of Britain’s “Motorsports Valley,” home to several Formula 1 teams, Everrati has already produced a range of head-turning conversions, including several Porsche 911 variants, a Land Rover Series IIA and a Ford GT40 MK2. With a staff of fewer than 50 people, it’s still a small and very hands-on operation. But Lunny is thinking bigger. “We certainly think there is a market to produce a few hundred cars a year… People love a very bespoke journey,” he said.
A growing U.S. market
That market is primarily overseas. Around 80 percent of Everrati’s sales come from the U.S. “We’re just about to deliver a car to a very high-profile financier in the Hamptons. We’re building one for a family in Nantucket. So it is exactly where you’d expect,” Lunny said.
To meet demand, the company has moved some of its production stateside. All of its Porsche-based builds are now completed in Irvine, Calif.
Most shops converting gas-powered classics into EVs are small, mom-and-pop-style operations. Everrati is working to distinguish itself by curating a unique brand and a client base. “What people are doing when they work with us is buying our expertise, buying our supply chain, buying the people that we have working in the business,” he said.
For Rimmer, that premium experience took about eight months from initial consultation to delivery and cost close to $450,000, including the price of the Porsche 911 (Type 964) donor car. The high cost reflects the labor-intensive process and the top-tier components used in Everrati builds.
“The motors we use are used in Formula E. They are used in the Aston Martin Valkyrie, the hybrid. They are used in the Lotus Evija,” Lunny explained. “They are the most power-dense motors available in the world. We are using silicon carbide inverters that are found in some of the world’s best hypercars.”
From Porsches to Lamborghinis—and beyond
Everrati recently took on one of its most ambitious projects yet: converting a Lamborghini LM002—a massive, Hummer-like off-roader built by the iconic Italian brand between 1986 and 1993.
“If someone said, ‘Build me a XYZ,’ we would certainly consider it, but it tends to be a very bespoke program,” Lunny said. “In the case of the Lamborghini, it will be many, many hundreds [of thousands], maybe even a million dollars to develop.”
While the company remains focused on bespoke transformations for now, Lunny doesn’t rule out building an original EV in the future. Still, the bigger opportunity, he says, may lie in business-to-business partnerships.
“A company might be developing a brand-new electric sports car, electric boat, electric whatever, and we will be the partner of choice that develops and delivers that EV powertrain,” he said.