The origin

A barnfind BMW and a gap nobody had filled

During the pandemic, I bought a barnfind 1971 BMW 2002. After I pulled the engine, the electric conversion idea stuck. When I went looking for help, I found what every builder finds: hundreds of forum threads, thousands of scattered YouTube videos, and no single place that put the whole picture together.

Professional shops that handle a conversion end-to-end charge $50,000 to $100,000 — out of reach for most people. Doing it entirely alone is its own kind of hard: sourcing the right components, getting them to work together, making sound technical calls across a multi-phase build most people have never attempted. There wasn't a real option in between.

Over the past year, I built electr0motiv alone — the AI coach, the community network, the knowledge base — using AI as a development partner throughout. The community and network design draws on 15 years spent at IBM building innovation networks and collaborative communities. I came to the coding itself as a journalist, not an engineer, and learned the platform by building it.

In May 2026, electr0motiv was selected for the Cleantech Open startup accelerator.

How it's organized

A global guild, local clusters

Membership isn't tied to living near a cluster. The AI coach, the project planning, and the documented builds all work the same whether you're building alongside five other members or entirely on your own.

Clusters form where enough members are already close together — shared space, tools, and hands-on help for the parts of a build that benefit from another set of hands. They're not the starting point. They're what a large enough membership eventually makes possible.