The Nine Lives of the Lectric Leopard, the Original Electric Renault 5

When I spied James Elliott’s Le Car at a local coffee shop, I had to pull over. The cheekily-named U.S. version of the Renault 5, the Le Car was a great design but cheaply made, rust-prone, and poorly supported in America. As a weird car junkie and recovering Renault owner, anybody driving one of the ultra-rare survivors is somebody I want to meet. As it turns out, James’ car is no common Le Car. It’s a Lectric Leopard, a malaise-era electric conversion created in Massachusetts.

Renault has been getting attention all year for its new Renault 5 E-Tech, but the Leopard was the first electrified 5. The contrast couldn’t be more stark: The E-tech uses lithium-ion batteries, offers more than 250 miles of range, and can hit 60 mph in eight seconds. The Leopard can only barely get you to 60 mph, and when new, it had around 60 miles of range on a good day.

Needless to say, like most malaise-era electrics, the heavy, slow, and costly Leopard ($9,500 from your local AMC dealer in 1981) was a hard sell. Only a few hundred were made, and many were parked early. James and his brother Joe fished this long-abandoned Leopard out of an Ohio garage in 2010 and fixed it up because they thought it was a cool engineering challenge, and it still is.

The Leopard is definitely a car made for the DIY electric tinkerer, but it’s also a window into what pre-lithium-ion battery EVs were like and the weirdly American history of electric Renaults, which starts with the 1959 Henney Kilowatt.

Parisiennes in America

By the late 1950s, EVs were all but dead. Early electrics from makes like Baker, Tate, and Studebaker were popular until WWI, but soon lost ground to the increasing speed, affordability, and practicality of gas cars. The problem was the batteries.

Lead-acid batteries, invented by Paris-based physicist Gaston Planté in 1859, are ideal for the electrical needs of gas-powered cars, easily providing enough juice for a starter motor and accessories, and charging slowly via the alternator. But to power a whole vehicle, you need a lot of these batteries, but each is heavy, and they can’t charge quickly. Adding batteries to extend range adds more weight, quickly becoming a self-defeating cycle.

The Kilowatt was backed by Exide Batteries’ parent firm, National Union Electric Company. It enlisted the help of Caltech scientists to help design a car to showcase its batteries—despite the fact that they weren’t so different from those early EV batteries—and tapped Henney, an old-line builder of limousines and ambulances, to build it. For a platform, the engineers deliberately chose a light, small car: the Renault Dauphine.

Renault experimented with electric versions of its Celtaquatre at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, but it hadn’t done much with electrics since. It had, however, thoroughly bungled its American launch in the late 1950s. After soaring from 1956 to 1959, Dauphine sales tanked thanks to iffy quality and disinterested dealers. With inventory piling up, Renault was happy to unload 100 cars to Henney.

Unfortunately, the Kilowatt went nowhere. It offered 60 miles of range and wasn’t much slower than the gas Dauphine, but it cost $3,600, as much as a 1960 Oldsmobile 88. Just 47 were sold, most to electric utilities.

In 1966, American engineer Robert Aronson created another, better electric Dauphine called the Mars I. Aronson invented new battery and speed controllers, a regenerative braking system, and used Lead-Cobalt batteries. It was truly a groundbreaking design at the time. In 1966, he put it into regular production as the Mars II, using the Renault 10’s body, which offered more room than the Dauphine and which he could get cheaply via Renault’s U.S. arm.

The Mars II’s downsides were its 4,260-pound heft—twice as much as a gas-powered 10, with predictable effects on handling—and $10,000 price, Cadillac Fleetwood territory in 1967. Aronson sponsored entries into Caltech’s 1968 Great Electric Race and did many high-profile demonstration runs, but only 50 Mars IIs were sold.

However, these cars and GM’s electric Corvairs inspired many amateur enthusiasts to try their hand at creating a practical electric car, including Massachusetts engineer Chandler Waterman.

Chandler Waterman and the Le Car Conversion

A DIY type who built his own house, Waterman had been fascinated with the idea of electric cars since his high school shop class days. In 1968, he built an electric Datsun 1200, capable of going 45 mph with a 75-mile range. It “was not particularly innovative,” in his own words, but it worked reliably as a cheap, short-range runabout and required hardly any maintenance.

By October 1973, he’d sold 23 of them, organized a company called CHW Industries to build them, and gotten national attention with a write-up in Car and Driver. That same month, the OPEC crisis put the public’s interest in alternative energy into the headlines. Waterman soon began working on new conversions, first experimenting with Dutch DAFs and their CVT “Variomatic” transmissions before settling on the Renault 5 in 1975.

Designer Michel Boué’s gas-powered Cinq was handsome, light, and cheap. It was new to the U.S. then and soon to be renamed “Le Car,” but it was already a proven bestseller at home. Its layout and size made it an ideal conversion candidate. Plus, as with Aronson a decade earlier, Renault was willing to sell Waterman “gliders”—cars without engines.

In his own words, he admitted that, like his Datsuns, the Lectric Leopard was an assemblage of durable, proven, off-the-shelf bits—mostly from golf carts and forklifts—and not something particularly innovative. This, he hoped, would reduce manufacturing and repair costs.

Each car had a 48-volt, 18-horsepower Prestolite electric motor, an onboard charger, and 16 six-volt lead-acid batteries weighing 600 pounds. As on the Datsun, the electric motor was bolted right up to the original clutch and gearbox with an adapter plate, so this was an EV with a manual transmission, something modern automakers are trying to recreate. “You wind through the gears pretty quick,” Elliott says, “Because all the power is down low.”

The 1970s EV Wave Crashes

Waterman wasn’t the only person to sense opportunity in electric vehicles in the 1970s, particularly after OPEC when many major automakers, including GM and Renault, started revisiting them.

The most successful EV of the era was 1974’s Sebring-Vanguard Citicar, a tiny, wedge-shaped, two-seat microcar that may not have been the best representative to form an image of electrics in the public consciousness. In 1979, NHTSA engineer Robert Krauss remarked that the CitiCar was “A sad first attempt because everyone wanted to see electric cars get going.”

Sebring-Vanguard ultimately went broke, but it signaled the potential of more normal electrics. A host of similar conversion companies popped up from 1977 to 1981, including Lectra Motors (Datsun conversions), Jet Industries (Fords and Chryslers), JMJ Electronics (Dodge Omnis and later Suzuki Samurais), SCT (South Coast Technologies, VW Rabbits), and a revived Sebring-Vanguard, now called Comuta-Car.

In 1978, Waterman named his new car “Lectric Leopard,” reorganized his company into the publicly traded U.S. Electricar, and hired former Washington Star publisher John Hoy Kaufmann to help sell and distribute it. Kaufmann wasn’t a car guy, but he knew PR, and the Leopard got plenty of ink just as the second OPEC crisis hit in 1979. Newspaper stories often highlighted eager early adopters and dealers—one claimed to have 2,100 orders.

The Leopard could do about 55 mph flat out and about 65 miles on a full charge. The extra weight taxed the 5’s supple suspension, but it still handled decently and rode smoother than the donor car, even if it was slow. Unfortunately, the big battery array ate most of the trunk space, and despite the cost-saving measures, it still cost as much as a Saab 900 in 1979.

The main selling points were the Leopard’s low maintenance needs—no tune-ups, oil changes, or carburetors—and its ultra-low energy costs. In his sales pitch, Kauffmann pointed out that most Americans rarely drive more than 35 miles a day (still true in 2024), and the Leopard offered super low costs if that’s all you did.

Of course, for the money, most people wanted more room, speed, and capability. Despite being in the right place and time for OPEC II, the late 1970s EVs were still heavy, slow, and costly. By late 1980, at least one dealer was suing U.S. Electricar to get it to take back inventory. The exact numbers aren’t clear, but probably fewer than 250 Leopards were made.

The company experimented with the Fiat 127 in 1980, then switched over to Fiat Strada gliders in 1981, also using the Lectric Leopard name. Around the time of Fiat’s U.S. collapse in 1982, gas prices plummeted, and with them, the fortunes of most of the 1970s EV projects. Most had closed by 1989, though U.S. Electricar limped into the 1990s.

The Leopard Rides Again

Since it’s hard to accumulate mega miles on a 55-mph car that needs several hours of charging every 40 miles, most EVs like this were parked early and essentially impossible to sell. Ironically, that means a fairly high number of clean survivors. Le Cars and Stradas, rot-prone and abandoned by their makers, quickly vanished from U.S. roads; but many Leopards were stored and forgotten. When James and his brother found this one, it wore 1980s tires, had no batteries, and hadn’t run in years.

Part of the attraction was that the car was so quirky and unusual, but the challenge of making it work again also appealed. Plus, it was cheap—only $900—and at least rolled even if the brakes didn’t work. The brake hoses had collapsed from age and the master cylinder was blown. They trailered it 150 miles to Oxford, Ohio, near the Indiana border and began tinkering.

“The car also has a regular 12-volt battery for its regular systems, just like modern EVs,” Elliott says, “Before we spent a ton of money on replacing all the drive batteries, we tested the electric motor with the regular battery and a partial string of six-volts. It still spun, so we decided we’d go all in and fix it.” They repaired the brakes and spent $600 on new batteries but soon had to move it across town to their parents’ larger garage.

En route, the car lost power twice and died entirely on a hill after the voltage started to spike and then cut out entirely, the tiny volt gauge swinging wildly. A friend with a tractor had to be enlisted to pull them the final few hundred yards. “What I thought were zip ties of some sort under the motor were the remains of the brush springs. My suspicion is still that the voltage pulse killed them and tore them out,” says Elliott. Now, they had an electric car with no electric motor. “Having spent money on some batteries, the sunk cost fallacy makes you want to keep going.”

The brothers removed the motor and had the clutch resurfaced. “It’s just a standard R5 transmission with an adapter plate, but the key was finding another motor.” Amazingly, the brothers found another Lectric Leopard owner in Michigan who planned to strip out all the electrical guts and restore his as a standard Le Car. From him, they got everything they needed to put their Leopard back on the road.

Over time, they made many improvements, most notably adding a more modern 48-volt motor controller, a DC-to-DC converter to eliminate the need for a separate 12-volt battery and allow larger 8-volt batteries in the drive array. Eventually, they added a milk-crate-based rear battery tray to free up cargo space. “Our parents had to help weigh the back down when we installed it because it rides so high with no batteries in it. It was briefly a whole-family project.”

Other upgrades include custom circuitry to automate the original charger and pulse the hazard lights while the car charges, a custom-made extendable charging cord that sits under the fuel cap, beefier Renaut R5 Alpine brake calipers, LED bulbs in virtually every light fixture, heated seat covers, and a tiny forced-air heater to accompany U.S. Electrcar’s defroster coil, and European R5 headlights for better illumination.

They even added plastic rear windows to lighten the load. By the time James and the car moved to Seattle in 2015, the car was fit for daily driving, with a reliable 30-35 mile range. He commuted in it daily, plugging into a wall outlet at work until his job took him to Japan in 2017.

Old EVs, New Ideas

While he was away, the Leopard sat for five long years. “Initially, my brother would run errands in it, but then it just sat. As a result, the batteries are super worn down now and only good for 10-15 miles.” When Elliott returned from Japan in early 2023, he started bringing the car back to life by repairing some floor rust (it is, after all, a former Ohio car) and then planned to tackle replacing the batteries and explore new tech, but a bout with long COVID interfered.

“I’m sadly still in the middle of it and there’s no real end in sight,” he says. Indeed, we had to put off our photo day a couple of times as a result. Plans are afoot for more upgrades, however. “Having replaced the motor, the control unit, the adapter plate, and having seen how U.S. Electricar did things, I now have lots of ideas about how to do it better. It’s been over a decade since we replaced all the batteries and now there are new alternatives.”

Indeed, in the years since written-off Teslas, Nissan Leafs, and other EVs began hitting Copart auctions, many old EV conversions have gained a new lease on life via salvaged or aftermarket components. Modern lithium-ion batteries and electric motors are lighter and much more powerful than anything the 1970s converters could ever have offered. Not only does that mean more of these are back on the road, but there’s a cottage industry of new EV conversions and even some political interest in helping DIY-ers.

“This car’s still pretty close to how it was originally,” James says, “But when you’re maintaining or improving a car like this, it’s always a question of what makes sense, in terms of function and cost, to keep it going. A set of new lead-acid batteries cost about $1,200 last time, and I’m just researching smaller, lighter batteries and AC motors now. These would be great additions. More power, less weight!”

He’s determined to get the car back to a truly usable state, and the cost of using the car might help make up for some of the money spent upgrading it.  “When I was commuting in it, I also had an electric stove. How much I cooked had more of an impact to my monthly bill than how much I drove.” Waterman and Kaufmann would be proud.