The First Ever Diesel Swapped Tesla is Coming to Life

These days, when it comes to cutting-edge engine swaps, the Tesla swap seems to be one of the more popular selections. Sure, gearheads are still shoving the LS engine in pretty much everything. However, it seems like creative types and early adopters are taking Tesla powertrains and putting them in different sorts of vehicles.

However, there is one creator out there who is going in the opposite direction. Instead of taking combustion-powered vehicles and transplanting electric power under the hood, Rich Rebuilds has been up to something a little bit different.

In one of his most recent completed creations, Rich decided to dive into an LS swap head first. However, this wasn’t just any swap as it would be the first of its kind, taking a Tesla and adding combustion-powered to the mix. It’s something that has been talked about since Tesla has become popular but the complexity of the swap is one that has prevented anyone from taking it on up until now.

As the LS-powered Tesla has finally been completed, it seems as if Rich has moved on to a new project. In the next one, we stay in a similar vein as the platform in question will be yet another Tesla. Instead of an LS engine, this time, though, Rich is going to take on the engine swap that transplants a diesel engine from a bread truck into a Tesla.

Down in the video below, we get the initial roadmap for the project. Rich says that an old-school mechanical Cummins engine that’s easy to create a lot of power with and comes with a manual transmission pulled from the bread truck seems like a great candidate to make this Tesla really stand out.

Swapping a combustion engine into a Tesla is one thing but watching one roll black smoke out of the exhaust will be something else entirely!