This 1966 Mustang Is Actually a Tesla With ‘Full Self-Driving’

Shcherbanyuk said he didn’t have a specific car in mind for his conversion project. He and his brother only knew they wanted a classic car.

Shcherbanyuk found a ’66 Mustang located in Reno and had a local tow truck driver pick it up. The car looked better in photos than in person, Shcherbanyuk said.

“We probably overpaid a little bit for it, but it’s OK,” Shcherbanyuk said. “We weren’t sure what we were going to do. I just wanted something running and in OK condition.”

The Mustang seemed to be on its last legs.

“Realistically, this car would’ve went into the scrapyard in a few years,” he said.

There was no blueprint Shcherbanyuk could follow to convert the Mustang.

“We were just kind of going with the flow,” he said.

At first, his family considered fitting the Mustang with components from a Model S. But once he stripped down the car, Shcherbanyuk realized that the Model 3 battery was nearly a perfect fit.

He said he was able to use the entire chassis of the Model 3.

“It’s pretty much almost like the ‘skateboard’ of a Model 3, but cut into three sections to fit pretty much within that Mustang wheelbase,” he said.

Almost everything that can be found under the hood of the Tesla Model 3 can be found under the hood of the Mustang.

Fitting all the components involved cutting out parts of the Tesla Model 3 frame and welding them onto the Mustang.

“There were a lot of fabrications that needed to be done,” Shcherbanyuk said.

The interior is a mix of the past and present.

The seats, taken from a Tesla, have heating and cooling, but the windows have to be rolled down with a hand crank.

Shcherbanyuk installed Tesla’s main media console in the car, which allowed him to control the vehicle’s functions through the 15-inch screen and receive regular firmware updates.

The original ’66 Mustang also did not have air conditioning. This one does.

Not all of the functions of the original Tesla are available in the Mustang.

For example, the air vents are manually adjusted and can’t be controlled with the touchscreen. Some firmware updates are also no longer available for the converted car.

“We have the Cybertruck steering wheel, and that thing never updates, although it does work perfectly fine,” Shcherbanyuk said.

Shcherbanyuk installed the Tesla charging port in the same spot where the ’66 Mustang’s gas cap was originally located: at the rear of the car.

Shcherbanyuk said he has been able to get 258 watt-hours per mile, which would be just as efficient as, if not more than, a Tesla.

During a test drive on a Thursday afternoon, the Mustang-Tesla’s screen indicated that it had 194 miles of range left at around 80% battery.

The Mustang was retrofitted with Tesla’s cameras, which are critical for functions such as Sentry Mode and backing up, and for a key feature of every Tesla: Autopilot and Full Self-Driving.

Shcherbanyuk said he initially did not know if he’d attempt to install the components needed for the advanced driver-assistance system to work.

“How the Autopilot actually came to be was that we wanted to put the Model 3 power steering rack in there to have power steering,” he said. “And then once we threw that in there, we were like, ‘We might as well just start putting the cameras and everything else in there.'”

According to Shcherbanyuk, getting FSD fully operational required some experimentation with the placement and angling of the cameras on the Mustang’s fender.

Then he had to drive the car about 2,000 miles to get the cameras properly calibrated.

“Biggest challenge was probably getting Full Self-Driving to work,” he said. “It was just very, very time-consuming.”

The FSD on the Mustang still has some kinks that a normal Tesla wouldn’t experience.

During FSD’s “chill” mode, Shcherbanyuk encountered a few moments where he took control of the steering wheel.

The Mustang’s body is also longer than a Model 3. That means the FSD gets a bit closer to the car in front when the Mustang approaches a stop, Shcherbanyuk said.

For now, FSD also doesn’t operate at night due to technical issues with the headlights that Shcherbanyuk still needs to resolve.

The conversion project took nearly two years to finish, with eight months of actual labor put into the vehicle, Shcherbanyuk said.

Considering the $10,000 for the Mustang, about $15,000 for the Model 3 components, other replacement parts, and the paint job, Shcherbanyuk estimated the total cost of the conversion to be around $40,000.

There were a few car purists who thought Shcherbanyuk’s project a sacrilegious act against such an iconic American vehicle. Still, the Calimotive owner said most people have been enthusiastic about the conversion, and he’s gotten requests for conversions.

Shcherbanyuk said he’d likely build another Mustang if he winds up selling this one.

“Most people don’t get how much labor is needed to do something like this,” he said.