We Drive Jonathan Ward’s Ridiculously Cool, All-Electric ’49 Mercury

• Jonathan Ward's all-electric '49 Mercury uses twin AM Racing electric motors to produce 400 hp and 475 lb-ft of torque, with a top speed of 120 mph.

• Prices vary widely, but something like this is around a half million bucks right now. As processes and powertrains get more streamlined, who knows, that could drop.

• Ward said five years developing the ’49 Mercury got so expensive he just stopped charging the client.
  

Jonathan Ward’s projects are all pretty cool, but the electric ’49 Merc might be the coolest yet. At least so far. He and his ICON specialty design house have big plans.

We first wrote about the e-Merc four years ago when it debuted at SEMA. It was the hit of the show: a surface-rusted ’49 lowered just right with just enough patina to make it look lived-in and loved. The big difference between this and a thousand other custom, lowered ’49-’51 Mercuries was that the powertrain underneath all that perfectly curated rust was electric.

The car sports a custom drivetrain that took five years to come together—five years of trial and error, technological advancement, and both rough and fine tuning. Pop the hood and you see what appears to be some sort of billet V8 but is in reality a battery pack and controller that has been configured to look like a billet V8. So clever. Four years ago, everyone at SEMA freaked out. We freaked out. There was a lot of freaking out going on in Las Vegas that year.

In total there are 85 kWh of Tesla batteries in the car, spread out wherever there was room and wherever their weight balance made sense. The car has a slight rearward weight bias, just as you might want if you were setting up a sports car.

The space where the transmission would have gone has been filled with two AM Racing permanent magnet motors lined up like those dual-engine dragsters back in the days of the nitro fuel ban in drag racing. They make a total of 400 hp and 470 lb-ft of torque. Longitudinally aligned, they feed their output via a driveshaft straight back to a limited-slip rear differential and thence to both rear wheels. It sounds deliriously fun.

“Let’s go,” Ward says, and backs the big Merc out of his 120,000-square-foot workshop full of projects you would love to take on if you only had the time or the money or the staff or whatever it takes to keep so many plates spinning on so many sticks.

The interior is as comfortable as first class on a Graf Zeppelin, with custom-picked seat material and machined switchgear all of Ward's designs. The Mercury rides low but is not harsh. We wheel out the big lot full of still more potential projects and onto the streets of Southern California’s San Fernando Valley, where the original custom ’49 Mercs first cruised the streets in anger way back in the day, before Ward or even we were born.

“We have four-corner weight distribution, balanced, which is important to me because I didn't want to lose the value of this balls-out chassis,” he said.

Wait, what kind of chassis?

“I call it balls-out but I mean, when Art Morrison and I are given enough budget and we geek out, this is our go-to formula.”