The electric car of today may be a lot like the dead guy being carried to the cart at the beginning of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Cart Master: Bring out yer deeeeaaaad!

Customer: Here’s one.

Dead guy: I’m not dead!

Cart master: He says he’s not dead.

Customer: Yes he is.

Dead guy: I’m getting better! I think I’ll sing a song!

You remember the movie: The electric vehicle was supposed to have died several years ago when the California Air Resources Board gave up trying to force carmakers to build and sell them. But just because no one has to make EVs doesn’t mean no one is making them.

AC Propulsion’s Scion xB electric vehicle conversion is a fun drive. AC yanks out the Scion’s mechanical guts and swaps in its own electrical innards: a 120-kilowatt, 162-lb-ft, 13,000-rpm AC Propulsion electric motor with regenerative braking and integrated charging; a 550-pound, 39-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack good in our test car for 150 miles; and a bi-directional grid interface that with a thousand or so other like-wired xBs can help power up the city when rolling blackouts loom.

AC Propulsion has been in business for 14 years in San Dimas, engineering electric cars and drivetrains used in many if not most electric vehicle projects.

A test drive is remarkably simple—you step on the throttle and it goes. In 46 miles the charge dropped by about one third. We see no reason why 99.9 percent of our fellow Angelenos crowding us on the San Bernardino Freeway shouldn’t be in AC’s EV.

Ah, but there is a reason: The first dozen or so conversions will cost $55,000 apiece. But AC has new majority ownership led by retired battery chemist Lu Chow and is looking toward China and Taiwan for markets and manufacturing.

“We now have the wherewithal to go forward with the Scion project,” said AC president Tom Gage.

Tesla has some wherewithal, too. The EV startup publicly touts its $60 million in capital, most of which is from Silicon Valley billionaires like PayPal’s Elon Musk. Tesla will launch its first EV roadsters next summer with $100,000 window stickers. But at that price you get performance to match: 0 to 60 takes four seconds and top speed is 135 mph.

We got a ride in a Tesla and found it almost as thrilling as the three-second 0-to-60-mph Wrightspeed X1 electric (“Screaming Fun,” Feb. 20). With a bonded aluminum chassis and carbon fiber body, the Tesla weighs 2500 pounds, much of which is battery. In addition to exotic-car performance, the big draw of the Tesla is a claimed 250-mile range.

With so many electrics in the works right now, let’s hope the industry does better than the dead guy from the Python movie. You might recall he was finished off with a klonk on the head and got dumped on the cart. Dead.