Fellten transforms vintage Porsches, Land Rovers and Minis into clean EVs

Imagine an old car made new again, but even better. Pop the hood and the engine is gone, replaced by a battery. The familiar retro curves, details, and timeless design are untouched. Only now, the car moves quietly, smoothly and without emissions. 

Based in the UK, Fellten is transforming decades-old cars into clean electric vehicles (EVs), putting classic Porsches, Land Rovers, and Minis back on the road — and without the gas. It’s a bold example of the circular economy that emphasises eliminating waste and encourages reuse, refurbishment, and repurposing products rather than replacing them. Each converted vehicle represents materials saved, emissions avoided, and history preserved. 

“The goal is to give all of these classic cars a new life by creating a solution that you can bolt in without changing the bones,” says Lucy Dicken, design engineer at Fellten.

“With our projects, we’re taking an item that was not designed to be electric, which involves an incredible amount of design and development,” adds Alex Dawood, one of the co-founders of Fellten. “We’re fundamentally taking a battery that’s normally underneath a car and making it engine-shaped to put under the hood. At the same time, we’re doing this without making any modifications to the original chassis or vehicle at all.”

How Fellten makes an old car new again 

Electrifying a classic car is anything but a straightforward swap. Every vehicle comes with its specific designs and constraints, demanding bespoke work to make sure the battery and electronics fit perfectly, whether it’s a Mini, Porsche or Land Rover. Everything needs to be taken into consideration without compromising how the car looks or drives. 

Fellten’s design process begins with collaborative brainstorming, where the team aligns on a concept and key requirements. From there, the idea moves into Autodesk Fusion, where a preliminary CAD model takes shape, capturing critical dimensions, electronics layouts, and core features in a shared environment. This early digital work allows the team to explore multiple ideas quickly before committing to physical components. Because Fusion is cloud-based, the team can work simultaneously, reviewing changes in real time and identifying potential conflicts sooner in the process. 

Following a design review, the model is rebuilt as a clean, production-ready CAD file, complete with final details. Prototyping comes next, followed by final adjustments for manufacturing. From concept to completion, the process typically takes about three months. 

“We get a lot of scan data that we import into Fusion just to make sure our designs will fit before we go on to prototype and then manufacture to install in real life,” Dicken says. “We also keep the weight as close to the original car as possible, so it handles and performs the same way.”

“In the CAD world with Fusion, you can very quickly design, develop, and test,” Hazell adds. “We can also do stress analysis and even look at things like flow rates with our liquid cooling plates to make sure we’re getting the right cooling systems for the batteries.”

Innovating new EV fleet charging solutions

Fellten isn’t limiting itself to only car retrofits. The company has also strategically identified the need for better charging infrastructure for fleet customers to adopt electric vans. For many operators, access to charging is the biggest barrier. 

With that opportunity in mind, Fellten is now expanding with the new Charge Qube, an innovative mobile solution designed with Fusion that brings scalable energy storage and EV charging anywhere. In keeping with their circular economy goals, the Charge Qube repurposes EV batteries, enabling them to live on another 15-20 years to charge new electric fleets.

Charge Qube can either be used with 3-phase grid supply or renewable energies such as solar or wind, and it’s highly transportable to remote and even semi-permanent locations. This flexibility allows fleets to transition faster, without waiting years for permanent infrastructure to be built.

“The main goal for Fellten is to provide a more sustainable future and looking at end-of-life battery packs, especially with the Charge Qube,” Dicken says. “We want to provide a circular economy for end-of-life battery packs, giving them another use, and providing a charging solution that can be deployed basically anywhere in the world.”

“What excites me most about Fellten is the fact that we’re actually going to start making a massive environmental difference,” Dawood adds. “Yes, we’ve been saving beautiful classics and retraining people into a new industry. But with our energy storage products, we’re actually going to be able to get high-emission van fleets transitioning to electric faster. We’re going to help that transition to a net-zero world as fast as possible, and we can use Fusion to design these products to help make it happen.”