Would you fit an expensive electric motor in a classic car?

It was chilly enough to require gloves while driving. Of course, I could have turned on the heating, but with a thirst of 3.5kW per hour on a battery with a capacity of only 40kWh, you don’t want to waste the available charge. Not that you’d be going that far in the Nissan Newbird, which, for all its undoubted charms, isn’t going to take you much more than 90 miles without you getting the queasy feeling that all electric cars give you when they’re about to leave you stranded with a flat battery.

Newbird? Lurid paintwork aside, what we have here is actually a 1989 example of the Bluebird. Since the first generation in 1957, Nissan’s go-to mini­cab ride sold around the world in just about every configuration imaginable – rear- and front-wheel drive; four and six cylinders; badged as Datsun and Nissan; and in saloon, hatchback and estate forms.

Succeeded by the equally forget­­­table Primera in 1990, the Bluebird’s significance is that it was the first car produced in Nissan’s factory in Tyne and Wear, which was opened by prime minister Margaret Thatcher and Nissan president Yutaka Kume in 1986 and became Europe’s most efficient.

The earliest UK-built Bluebirds were essentially CKD cars, industry vernacular for “completely knocked down” – basically, a kit of constituent parts imported from Japan, with paint and trimming on site. With a single trade union at the plant, massive oversubscription for the few hundred jobs available, and Nissan’s production systems in place, there were a lot of incentives to produce something decent.

Whether the Bluebird was ever a decent car is up for debate, but it was very well built, which is why it became the choice of the licensed cab trade, who valued reliability and economy of operation above on-the-limit handling and any semblance of glamour.

That was 36 years ago, and to celebrate the occasion and to link to Sunderland’s current battery-electric Leaf output, well, you’ve guessed it, Nissan has resto-modded (a fusion of “restored” and “modified”) an original UK-produced Bluebird with the 30kW motor and inverter from a first-generation Nissan Leaf electric car, along with a new 40kWh Leaf battery pack.

 Well, actually, it was George Kinghorn and his son at Kinghorn Electric Vehicles in Durham who worked on a donor 1989 Bluebird 1.8GS sourced by Nissan UK. The result is a leisurely 107bhp and 210lb ft driving the front wheels, with 0-60mph in about 15 seconds and a top speed of about 85mph.

There has been some comment about how, in performance terms, this electric conversion isn’t far removed from the original 1.8 Bluebird, but the truth is that it’s quite a bit slower. In a 1986 group test, Autocar wrung 102mph and 0-60mph in nine seconds out of a better-specified 90bhp/111lb ft 1.8LX Bluebird, while praising the easy torque of the engine and the excellent transmission. 

The all-round MacPherson strut-­suspended Bluebird gave predictable handling and a decent ride; in a group test, it finished behind the Renault 21, but ahead of the Austin Montego, Ford Sierra and Vauxhall Cavalier.

So, you’ll need a large salt cellar when you hear how fantastic these electric conversions are, because there are so many elements that can go awry, from control weighting and response, dynamic ride and handling, installation safety and security, to the fit and finish of new components in an old dashboard. As one EV converter said: “High-voltage drive units and batteries are not things for the amateur mechanic.”

As I crawl underneath the car as it stands in the Midlands industrial unit housing Nissan UK’s historic fleet, it appears that, in basic installation at least, Kinghorn has done a lovely job. Rightly, it has kept this as a bolt-in conversion, and you could refit the petrol engine if so moved.

Bluebirds came with a six-year corrosion warranty, although 36 years on this one is well past its best at the back, where the boot floor looks like a doily and the suspension components are pitted and corroded.

Nevertheless, the twin battery packs (two-thirds of the capacity) look well attached on their own plated structure in the boot, and the under-bonnet installation is masterful, with fabricated mountings off the crossmember, neat cable runs and almost an original manufacturer’s level of finish. There are ­separate motors for the brake-vacuum servo, the power steering and the motor-cooling water pump, with a custom radiator. They’ve even illuminated the Nissan badge in the grille. You probably wouldn’t want to crash any car made in the 1980s, but whether the extra battery by the Leaf inverter alongside the front offside wheel arch is the safest place for it is debatable.

The facia is deceptively original, even down to the clackety plastic steering column stalks and the main instrument binnacle. Yet there’s a fabricated rotary dial where the gear lever would have originally been situated, which also has controls for the lighting and heater. In fact, a lot of work has gone in here, with the original fuel gauge now displaying the battery charge and all the instruments (bar the rev counter) working.

Climb in and the weird brushed-nylon seat upholstery immediately grabs your body and starts to undress you. The interior feels huge considering the exterior dimensions (4,516mm long, 1,689mm wide and 1,389mm high), although there’s relatively little side or frontal impact protection in the bodyshell that you get with modern cars. At 1,190kg, it weighs 35kg more than its 1.8-litre petrol-engined counterpart.

Don’t be fooled by the big push-button switches, the cassette/radio and the staticky interior, the Bluebird was quite a modern, if conservative, car in its day. The mirrors were electrically adjust­able, the windows had electric lifts, the doors had central locking, the tilt-and-slide sunroof was also powered, and the steering was power assisted.

Starting with the twist of a traditional key is almost ludicrously simple compared with a modern car with a separate starter button. There’s a brief period of system and safety checks, and then you dial in forward or reverse and push the accelerator pedal. There’s no creep in the system, but the accelerator is nicely weighted and progressive.

It doesn’t exactly leap away from standstill, but there’s a nice surge of torque, which builds as the speed­ometer nudges 30mph. By the time you’ve got to 60mph, aerodynamics and the lowly power of the motor take their toll, but we saw a solid 75mph during the test and there was a bit more to come. Kinghorn says it could tweak the software to extract 200bhp from the drivetrain (at the cost of range), but in reality the power/torque balance suits the car and its likely use.

What’s most impressive is the gentle, progressive power delivery and the way the major controls retain the original car’s weighting and ease of use. The brakes, for example, are terrific, with a tiny bit of battery generation, but not at the cost of feel or initial bite.

The ride is pretty good, but there’s a bit of bounce at the rear end. Kinghorn says a set of height-adjustable Bilstein suspension units has allowed a better stance, although a set of adjustable dampers would work wonders with the over-eager suspension rebound.

There’s a fair bit of body roll and you sail it along the road rather than point and squirt, but that’s what the car was like when petrol-driven, so the electric conversion hasn’t really changed much.

Recharging is via a 6.6kW Type One port salvaged from the first-generation Leaf; the plug inlet lives under the old petrol filler flap. It restricts the car to a 7.4kW recharge on a home wallbox. A full recharge would therefore take about six hours.

Kinghorn says a Type 2 or even a fast-charge slot could be fitted on the other side, which would allow access to 11kW street chargers (which would reduce a full recharge to under four hours) and 50kW DC fast chargers, which would provide an 80 per cent charge in less than an hour.

That would make more practical sense, but the battery range (or lack thereof) isn’t what would deter most 1980s saloon owners making the conversion to battery power. The big drawback is cost. The donor Bluebird cost £4,000 and didn’t require a huge amount of work to keep it as a spirited reminder of Nissan’s early manufacturing days in the UK, but the conversion costs, which start at £25,000, were probably nearer £35,000 by the time it was delivered. I’m glad they did it, but the economics simply don’t stack up.

There is a big noise around these electric “resto-mods” at the moment, as wealthy companies and owners, supported by impressionable journalists, seek to make their classic cars more environmentally acceptable. Undoubtedly, as a publicity vehicle for Nissan UK, linking the Bluebird with the current Leaf, this Newbird will have been worth the significant investment as it faces a second life (or should that be third?) performing visitor tours of the Tyne and Wear factory.

But I’ve also heard of rare and precious pre-and post-Second World War historic cars being cut up and converted to electric propulsion, where in fact the original petrol engine and gearbox are part and parcel of the vehicle’s identity and charm.

So, is this an appropriate response to climate change? Is it part of the fashionable movement to tear up (and down) things that offend our sensibilities? And in a world where there are only about 140,000 pre-1970 cars known to the DVLA, most of which do very low mileages and support a fairly substantial industry in the UK, wouldn’t a more appropriate response be to offset the carbon dioxide they produce or even run them on e-fuels?

An expensively greenwashed classic, or a valuable updating of an unsung repmobile? Only you can decide. As it stands, I’m glad they built the Newbird, and the engineering is really impressive, but it sure generates more questions than it answers.

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