This Volvo Wagon Rat Rod Is Actually A Tesla

Modern electric cars often offer a comfortable quiet ride with a lot of cutting-edge technology baked in. What they don’t provide as readily is a sense of being classic, vintage, or old-school cool. That’s where this Volvo Amazon body swapped onto the chassis of a Tesla Model S comes into play. It’s a dazzling mix of new and old.

Spawned from the mind of Vintage Volts owner Tom Zidek, the end result is something he’s called TeZon. “In the ’60s, the Amazon Kombi was built as a family do-everything car. You were able to tow a trailer, fit the whole family and the dogs in, or put skis or surfboards on the roof! With The TeZon, we want to keep this spirit alive and move it into today’s world,” he says.

Now, after starting the build in 2016, the car is officially registered and legal to drive in public. Here’s a quick peek at what Zidek has accomplished over the better part of a decade with a car that he drives and uses regularly.

Zidek is no stranger to body swaps or Tesla electric drivetrain swaps. Vintage Volts specializes in exactly that type of work and has already completed two other projects involving a 1955 VW Beetle and a classic Land Rover Defender. Unlike the TeZon, those cars simply had electric drivetrains swapped into them. The TeZon would take a lot of hand-crafting.

Interestingly all of this actually started with the TeZon. Tom bought it as a personal project before he started Vintage Volts as a business. He’d already built and restored a crashed Porsche 911 Turbo S in 2013 and decided in 2016 to go carbon neutral which is where the first Tesla that would later become the TeZon came into play.

He bought a different Tesla Model S and repaired it for daily family use. In the background he continued to work on the Volvo/Tesla mashup and in 2022, he started his new business with the help of Electric Classic Cars. Now, the two work together to electrify classic vehicles.

Tom and his wife both love classic cars and the Volvo Amazon made more sense for them due to the size of their family. A commercial from 1962 touted the Amazon as a car that you could “drive like you hate it” and that it was “cheaper than psychiatry.” Basically, this family car was built to handle a rough life which made it great for Zidek’s purposes.

The flexibility and reliability of the Model S are also part of why he chose the Tesla. He liked the charging network, the battery chemistry, and the performance. A video from 2019 actually documents Tom’s plan for the car when the original Tesla sat in his garage with none of its body panels attached.

To make the Tesla chassis fit under the Amazon he had to cut up two different Volvo bodies and weld them together. That added a bit of length to the Amazon Combi and, overall, the current result looks quite good. In fact, Zidek has rear-facing jump seats in the car that can now support adult passengers.

A recent feature video by the Swedish YouTube channel Arcticlean highlights where the build stands right now. Tom has a custom-built roll cage near the C-pillar inside of the cabin for structural rigidity and safety. The B-pillars from both the Amazon and Model S still exist in the car whereas just the Volvo A-pillar remains up front.

Completed to the point that it’s road-worthy, Tom now has paperwork affirming that it’s road-legal not just in Sweden but also across the European Union. He’ll be riding in style too thanks to a ton of beautiful hand-painted work on the body. A local artist lent brush strokes to the doors and fenders with the Vintage Volts logo and then a Swedish flag motif ended up on the roof.

Beautifully, the flag graphic lines up perfectly with the welding lines on the roof that join the entire body of the completed Amazon together. As body swaps go it’s one of the wildest and maybe one of the most stylish. Originally, Zidek intended to paint this whole car Tesla Red. We’re glad he didn’t. Now, as he rolls around Scandinavia nobody will suspect a thing unless they see his shop’s logo on the doors.