Macchina

Minneapolis, MN  ·   macchina.cc

We started as a group of friends with experience in consumer electronics making hardware to fit the needs of our own automotive projects. Over time we realized many people - ranging from hobbyists to prototyping labs and even entrepreneurs - could benefit from the work we are doing. Now we are a larger team making hardware for everyone’s projects.

A couple years ago, a few of us got together to work on a fun side-project: we turned an old Ford Contour into an electric car. We replaced the existing gasoline motor with an electric motor and the fuel tank with batteries. Rather quickly we realized that a major obstacle was convincing the various computers within the car to not be too upset after its engine had gone missing. We wanted the gears in the automatic transmission to shift at the ideal time, the fuel gauge to display battery capacity and generally wanted our “new” car to perform exactly how we wanted. Our challenge stemmed from the closed, unpublished nature of modern-day car computers. We started Macchina to solve this problem.

Eventually, we realized that others might benefit from a product like M2, not just for electric car building but for more general applications.