A Classic Mercedes Roadster Is Going Electric in a New Partnership

Hemmels, a Cardiff, Wales-based company that rebuilds Mercedes-Benz SLs, will soon offer an electric drivetrain for the W113 “Pagoda” models to the tune of half a million dollars through a new partnership.

The W113 SL is a glamorous two-seat roadster, which replaced the 190SL. It was introduced as the 230 SL at the 1963 Geneva Motor Show, then was gradually replaced by larger-engine models until the end of the line in 1971. The model was quite popular in the U.S., where nearly 20,000 were sold.

“We were on a route to develop a battery powertrain in-house at Hemmels, and we began to realise what a complex undertaking it is, given international regulations. That’s when we discovered that Everrati had already engineered a solution,” says CEO Tom Butterfield.

The result is a collaboration between Hemmels and Everatti—which restores and electrifies classic “icons” from Porsche, Mercedes, and Land Rover from its base in Bicester, Oxfordshire. Hemmels will restore the cars and Everrati will install electric powertrains. The partnership will be officially announced on Friday, and SLs from both companies will be shown at the upcoming Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance during Monterey Car Week (Aug. 9-18). The first jointly produced car should be available to customers in November or December. Ordering a car and taking delivery will take eight to 10 months.

The price for a full Hemmels build, with the Everrati electric drivetrain, is £400,000 (US$513,000), excluding the donor vehicle that the company can locate for customers. The cars will be offered internationally.

The SLs will have 68-kilowatt-hour batteries, distributed to help maintain the car’s ideal front-rear balance.

“The bulk of the weight will be where the original engine and gearbox were located, and there will also be batteries in place of the fuel tank and a small pack in the boot [trunk] occupying about the space of the spare tire,” says Justin Lunny, Everrati’s founder and CEO. As battery technology evolves, Lunny says, it should be able to get a more powerful pack into the same locations, and upgrades can occur.

Another British company Helix, a Lotus supplier, will provide a power-dense but compact 300-horsepower motor that together with the battery pack should yield a range of 200 miles and a zero-to-60 miles per hour time of under seven seconds. The cars will use a limited slip differential for good grip, and will be equipped for regenerative braking—recapturing energy and allowing “one pedal” driving. “The end result is a very usable driving experience,” Lunny says.

“Our process in rebuilding the cars is very in-depth, and it’s what makes us stand out,” says Butterfield, whose family bought Hemmels in 2018. “We use brand-new and upgraded parts—we don’t restore what’s there unless we absolutely have to go that route.” The restoration process can take 4,000 worker hours, and bespoke buyers have wide latitude in colours, interior materials, and a choice of options. High-end audio and Bluetooth are available.

The cars will have already been rebuilt by Hemmels by the time they take their 130-mile journey to Everrati, where the drivetrains are—very carefully—installed.

Lunny says that the SLs will not be cut up or altered during the drivetrain installation. “We don’t damage the structure of the vehicle,” he says, “and everything is technically reversible. We retain the value of the original vehicle. The owners can keep the original internal-combustion engine, ensuring that it’s still with the car.” Butterfield adds that one of his clients is turning his engine into the base “for a glass table that will be installed in his man cave.”

Lunny describes the SLs as “art pieces that happen to have wheels. We love them like our babies, and everything we do is to a replicable standard, on par with what an [original equipment] manufacturer would do.”

The W113 SLs may be more than 50 years old, but their styling—and appeal across generations—remains timeless.

“It’s not just a certain age or demographic,” Lunny says. “The new audience is the ultra-high-net-worth individuals who adore beautiful iconic cars, especially the Pagoda, but want a clean-air powertrain, with modern air conditioning, that is enjoyable to drive.”

Butterfield intends to keep production relatively low, producing perhaps 10 to 12 electric Pagodas annually. “To stretch to 25 cars per year would risk the quality of our builds,” he says. Some 60% to 70% of Hemmels’ output has gone to U.S. buyers, and that’s one reason the Monterey appearance—the company’s first—is important to the brand.

Hemmels also works its magic on the earlier 190SL, and electric conversions of those models, through the partnership, are possible in the future, Butterfield says.

A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.

For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.

There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.

When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.

That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.

Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.

By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.

In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.

Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.

Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”

Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”

Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.

AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.

A Classic Mercedes Roadster Is Going Electric in a New Partnership

AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.