One of fifty stainless steel Mokes hand-fabricated in Queensland in the 1980s. Found half-restored on the coast after sixteen years. Now electric. Now built to last another forty.
That's how the first video about this car opens. We were standing next to a 1980s Super S Moke. The first S is for stainless. There were maybe fifty made, hand-fabricated by a refrigeration company in Queensland whose name nobody can quite remember. They were marketed to beach-house owners and yacht people who wanted a shore tender that wouldn't rust to pieces in a season.
This particular one sat half-restored on the Queensland coast for sixteen years before it found its way to the Jaunt workshop in Brimbank. You can see it in the photos. The non-stainless areas have visible corrosion. The brake lines, the wiper arms, anything mild steel. The body itself has light pitting from a life lived close to the salt, and a few weld marks that weren't pickled cleanly when they were laid down forty-something years ago.
The original Moke is rolled and curved. The Super S is angular, flat, almost obstinately squared off. The factory built rolling bonnets. The Queensland refrigeration crew built a flat one. They didn't have the press tooling to do anything else, and the result is a car that looks like nothing else on the road.
Stainless steel is harder to work with than the mild steel that the standard Moke is pressed from. It is more brittle. It stretches and moves in different ways. So instead of letting the body carry the load between the front and rear subframes, the original Queensland engineers added a box-section chassis tying the two together. No standard Moke has this. It makes the Super S stiffer, slightly lower in ground clearance, and structurally a different car. Their problem became our opportunity.
The brief from there was simple to say and harder to deliver. Make it ADR compliant. Preserve the original silhouette. Hide every piece of EV hardware. Build something that will be serviceable in twenty years.
The hardware list is small but it pulls its weight. A 72 kW permanent magnet AC motor making 175 Nm. A 19 kWh battery split front and rear, thirteen up front under the bonnet, six in the rear sub-frame area. A single-speed reduction gear running through the original CV drive shafts. Upgraded disc brakes. CCS2 DC fast charging, which to our knowledge makes this the first Mini or Moke globally with that capability. Bidirectional output: the car becomes a mobile generator at 240V, 15A.
It weighs 580 kg. That is lighter than the Moke this body left the factory as.
The lasers. Rand started by establishing a true centreline. With a body that has had forty-something years of life, including some sitting half-restored on the coast, you cannot assume anything is square. Every measurement that follows depends on that first laser-aligned baseline.
The polish. The body went out. It came back a lot shinier. The pitting was reduced, the weld marks worked over, the mirror finish you see in the hero shots starts here. Until this stage you don't really know whether the car is going to look like the dream version or something more compromised. It came back better than we'd hoped.
The bonnet. The original was floppy and worn out. Hugo rebuilt it from the ground up: new internal chassis structure for stiffness, three-piece hinges with little beauty caps so nothing visible has a fastener through it, all bonded with adhesive instead of welded so the panel shape stays true. The surface had ghost imprints of its rental life. "Earn frequent flyer points when you rent this Moke" was still faintly visible under the polish in some lights. We painted it satin black in the end, both to hide that history and to kill the reflection that would otherwise bounce straight off a mirror-finish bonnet into the driver's eye-line.
The wiring loom. Dylan fitted the back loom over a couple of long days. The control wiring on a vehicle like this is more complex than the high-voltage side. Hundreds of wires running from the front control unit through to interior lights, USB ports, indicators, tail lights, the Anderson plug, the soundbar speaker, the bidirectional charger interface. We work with a supplier now who labels every wire along its entire length. Park light. Left indicator. Anderson plug. So in twenty years, when somebody opens this loom for service, they can read what every wire does.
Everything is multi-strand tinned copper, run inside conduit, and the conduit is taped over a tape-wrapped harness underneath. Three layers of abrasion resistance. The tinning stops the copper oxidising in the salt air this car will live in.
The charge port. We did not want to put a big hole in the side of a polished stainless steel body. The Super S already had storage pockets in the side pods that flip up on lids. So the charge port lives behind one of those lids on a gas strut. When the car is parked and closed, you cannot see it. When you want to charge, you flip up the lid. It is the kind of thing you only notice on the second look.
The seat-belt structure. The Super S did not come with a seat-belt hoop the way later Mokes did. We built a tubular stainless one with welded domed caps, three-piece pivots so it folds out of the way for trim service, and a custom-machined boss for the seat-belt threads. The same hoop hides the speaker for the soundbar, which is a weatherproof off-road buggy unit running off Bluetooth. Roof-down at 100 km/h, the Moke and you will be the only ones who hear it.
The side screens and trim. Mokes are open cars by design. The side screens are the only weather they get. We rebuilt them with new tensioning, sail-track mounts on the body, and a centre strap so they sit cleanly when the car is parked and only flap a little at high speed. Ninety-eight percent of a Moke's life is slow, so we optimised the look at slow.
The body drop. One of us left the workshop for twenty minutes to get coffee. By the time we came back, the entire body had been lifted onto the chassis and bolted down. That is partly because the team is good at this and partly because the unique Super S architecture, with its connected box-section chassis, makes it easier to drop a body onto than a normal Moke would be. The first time you see it back together is the first time you really feel like it is a car again.
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The dashboard runs in two modes. Daily mode is reduced power: smooth, gentle, the kind of tune you actually want when you're crawling along the foreshore at thirty. Sport mode lights the dash up red and unlocks full torque. The car will absolutely embarrass you with the wrong throttle input.
The startup sequence is a small ceremony. Hand brake, key, dash bloom. Under the bonnet sits an ID plaque with the VIN, the output, and the line "Electric Moke #1." The badging on the body uses a CNC-machined Moke wordmark with a lightning bolt anodised black, with the top surface milled back to raw aluminium and clear-coated so the metal pops under any light.
The typeface on the badge is Krana Fat. The same family the Jaunt brand uses. The car carries a quiet signature without ever shouting it.
Some of these only land once you have lived with the car for a week. Others you might never notice at all. They're in here anyway, because the team wanted them to be.
The hidden charge port. Behind one of the original side-pod storage lids. Gas struts hold it open while you plug in. Closed, it disappears into the body line. Open, it telegraphs that this is something other than a 1980s Moke without ever putting a hole in the panel.
The soundbar in the seat-belt hoop. A weatherproof off-road buggy speaker mounted inside the tubular hoop and run off Bluetooth. The hoop is structural and acoustic at the same time. At a stop or a slow roll, you can hear it. Past about 80 km/h, the wind takes over and the music belongs only to you.
The Moke wordmark with a lightning bolt. CNC-machined from aluminium, anodised black, then the top surface is milled back to bare metal and clear-coated. Catches different light at different angles. Subtle, until it isn't.
The Electric Moke #1 plaque. Under the bonnet, where you only see it when you have a reason to look. VIN, output, build number. We made one. There won't be another quite like this.
The wing-pod can storage. The original Super S had storage pockets either side. We dimensioned ours to take a 375 mm tinnie tray. Specifically. A car you'd take to the beach should be able to hold what you take to the beach.
The C-Deck underfloor. The same slip-resistant foam decking used on small boats. Bonded to the underside of the floor pan. Practical, weather-resistant, and quiet over rough surfaces.
The rubber-cone suspension. Mokes inherit their suspension from the original Mini. Instead of metal coils or leaves, the springs are rubber cones. When this car was tested on the Boulevard in East Ivanhoe, which is famously the worst public road in Melbourne, it didn't just survive. It handled.
