CleanTechnica. Some begin the process and never finish. Peppermint Pattie is a love story, true romance told in the narrative of a restoration and conversion. I had seen Peppermint Pattie at EV exhibitions, but had never heard her story before. Thank you for sharing your story with us, Jo.Peppermint Pattie is a restored and converted 1967 Toyota Corona. Jo and her husband Brad began the work a couple of years before Brad’s sudden passing. The cancer was only discovered at autopsy.
Jo likes old cars. In fact, her first car was a ’70s Corona. She and Brad bought the car in 2017 to use as a Sunday driver. When Brad started up the car, he found that it had poor compression. Doing up the petrol motor was impeded by lack of parts. “It was block after block. Was this the god of Coronas telling us to go EV? We had no trouble sourcing body parts — they can be sourced from various places around South East Asia, but we couldn’t get motor parts.
Brad had the manual gearbox reconditioned and OZDIY made up an adaptor plate for the electric motor to bolt onto. Then out of the blue, Brad passed away. “He would have wanted the car finished. I did it in his honour. I just couldn’t let it go and wanted to finish it to a standard he would have been proud of. I had to learn a lot and get help from experts.” Brad’s father helped out with the mechanics and the chrome work.