Someone Built an Electric Honda CRX Decades Before Tesla. It Ended Up in a Junkyard

Long before Tesla popularized electric cars, a DIY Honda CRX conversion sat in a California junkyard, illustrating the early DIY EV scene. Spotted at a Pick Your Part in Chula Vista, the CRX wears conspicuous EV decals and shows a battery pack mounted behind the seats, with an onboard charger identified as a K&W BC-20, suggesting a home-built conversion rather than factory work. Honda’s broader EV story includes a second-generation CRX-based prototype from 1988, a 26-horsepower electric motor, aluminum body, and acrylic windows that weighed as a learning step toward later programs. Those lessons fed into the Honda EV Plus in the 1990s and laterFCX fuel-cell efforts. Across the industry, pre-21st-century conversions reflect a defiant enthusiasm for electric propulsion, even as the market lagged behind today’s mass market.