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Wayland assured him that the bright flash he saw was the result of a malfunction and not a selfie opportunity. The Datsun’s throttle jammed and Wayland had to pull the emergency breaker to kill the electrical current so the brakes could safely stop the car.

Electric vehicles (EVs) are commonplace today, but Wayland, 74, remembers the 1990s when hobbyists converted small cars, such as Ford Escorts and Renault 5s, into silent electric vehicles.

“Being environmentally minded, their hearts were in the right place. But 90 per cent of the conversions were built by people who actually don’t like cars,” he said.

Wayland isn’t one of those people. And, as a musician and music store owner, he brought the noise. He made waves.

“We would show up at EV shows with my car towed behind a sinister black Chevy Suburban with subwoofers blasting White Zombie music. People would tell us we were at the wrong event.”

With an electric motor’s inherent instant torque (rotational force), Wayland believed EVs could compete with gasoline-fueled dragsters over the quarter-mile, and set out to build a high-performance electric car that would leave the hobbyists and drag racers slack-jawed.

The Datsun was stripped of its 69-horsepower gas engine and related mechanicals, such as the radiator and the fuel tank.

Wayland kept the manual transmission, allowing him to smoke the tires in every gear — eventually. The problem was the aviation batteries; five were purchased used but they couldn’t hold a charge properly. And, regardless of the horsepower rating, electric motors are only as strong as the batteries feeding them.

“The motor could not produce 225 hp with just 175 volts of the tired batteries I had to power it,” Wayland explained. “It probably made closer to 70 hp.”

Still, when the White Zombie debuted in 1994 at the electric drag races in Wayland’s native Portland, Oregon, it crushed the local competition. Wayland undertook a continuous improvement program anyway.

He switched to smaller Hawker aviation batteries feeding a larger Kostov electric motor through a 1,200-amp controller. The hardware provided shorter elapsed times (ETs), although the enormous torque eventually destroyed the car’s axle and ring-gear teeth. (In drag racing, elapsed time, or ET, refers to the time it takes a vehicle to travel from the starting line to the finish line.)

Upgraded with a Ford nine-inch rear axle, an aluminum driveshaft and stickier drag tires, the White Zombie started posting some impressive times in 1999, including a quarter-mile ET of 13.557 seconds. Then the motor melted its armature windings.

“Fellow EV-ers told me the motor would blow right away, that I’d never clear 15 seconds,” Wayland said.

Further revisions included two “siamesed” electric motors sharing the same output shaft, lightweight lithium batteries and stronger driveline bits that tolerated the monstrous torque. Direct drive replaced the tortured manual transmission.

Crowds came to hear the Zombie’s angry power-drill whine.

A record-setting 11.446-second run in 2007 got Wayland kicked off the Portland raceway for being too quick.

“It was a badge of honour,” Wayland laughed. His Datsun was barred until it met the safety requirements for a sub-11.5-second car, including a full roll bar for the car and fire suit for the driver.

The 538-hp White Zombie would go on to set its best ET in 2010 with a time of 10.258 seconds at 123.79 mph, an eye-popping result for a homebuilt dragster, and a street-legal vehicle at that.

Having proven electric power can be a phenomenal motive force, Wayland turned his attention to the problem of EV range.

He converted a 2000 Honda Insight hybrid into an electric car by incorporating General Motors’ AC induction motor (taken from GM’s ill-fated EV1, which is featured in the documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?”) boosted to 200 hp and fed by a 71.6 kWh battery pack to yield 600 km of range.

“It’s our vision of what GM could’ve done and what Honda should’ve done,” Wayland said of the technology he harnessed to make his “EV2” a remarkable demonstration project.

It’s all the more impressive considering Wayland is self-taught with no formal training in engineering or electrics. He chronicled his struggles working on the Datsun conversion on the internet so others could learn from his mistakes.

He counts among his acquaintances former GM engineer and EV1 developer Alan Cocconi; Tesla Motors co-founder Jeffrey Straubel; and Mate Rimac, the Croatian entrepreneur, who credits Wayland for inspiring him to build the electric supercar that bears Rimac’s name.

“There was no literature about conversions,” Rimac noted last year. “Wayland was documenting his project so meticulously, sharing everything he learned building the White Zombie.”

Also following Wayland’s adventures: Casey Mynott, a former auto instructor whose class at Delta Secondary School in British Columbia built an EV dragster from an old Toyota pickup that packed 400 volts, enough to power it towards a 12-second ET — setting the first record for a Canadian electric dragster in 2011.

Wayland likes to emphasize his Canadian connections.

“I was sponsored by Dow Kokam and the lithium cells came to me through Corvus Energy in Richmond, B.C., which supplied batteries for hybrid-powered tugboats.”

Today, the White Zombie graces the driveway of Wayland’s suburban Portland home and is still used for (lightning quick) grocery runs.

Wayland recognizes his Datsun EV enlightened many about the potential of electric propulsion, and his venture is a testament to the adage that racing improves the breed.

“The White Zombie has been quite an ambassador for electric vehicles,” Wayland noted. “It was not only the inspiration for neat technical projects, but also brought like-minded people together on this journey.”