Our Electric Car

My wife and I drive an Electric Car every day. You could too! There is no need to wait for big car companies to come out with $40,000 production EVs - you can build your own EV for as little as $6,000. EVs are great to drive and perfectly suited for day-day commuting. There is very little maintenance as the only wearing parts are tyres and brakes. No oil, no water, no exhaust system and just one moving part in the motor. Think about it - most of your car maintenance and repairs are due to that horrible old petrol engine.

Our EV is charged from my home solar PV panels, so we pay nothing for fuel. To convert a car to electric drive and install the PV panels costs less than a new medium size petrol car.

I really like the idea that I have "recycled" a 15 year old petrol car into an EV - saving all the embodied energy required to manufacture a new car. So we emit no greenhouse gases in driving or charging our EV, and the greenhouse gases to build it were also very low (as we recycled an existing car chassis). At the end of their life the batteries are nearly 100% recyclable. Try doing that with petrol!

Best of all - the "fuel" for our EV is made right here at home - no dependance on dirty, rapidly depleting oil from other countries.

Building a Low Cost EV in 1 Week

In April 2009 we converted another Charade from ICE to Electric in just 3 days! We had originally planned 1 week, but had so much fantastic help we had a drivable electric car way ahead of schedule. It was a community effort - up to 10 people were helping at any one time. A great way to spend a weekend - recycling a petrol car to clean, renewable, electric drive.

Low Cost Electric Car

The conversion cost was around $8,000, the EV has a top speed of 75 km/hr and a range of around 50 km. Perfect for metro commuting. The conversion is based on the low cost Chinese EV kit with 8 110AH lead acid batteries.

We blogged on the conversion each day, and even took time lapse pictures so you can see the conversion coming together over the three days:

Michael has also put together a great video of the conversion. It really gives you a feel for the conversion process and the team effort involved:

Here are some files we used to produce the EV. The CAD files are in Autocad format, and drawn with the excellent and free QCad program.

The Adaptor Plate design was laser cut for just $88. Due to my poor measurement skills it is not quite correct, about 1 hour of filing was required on the bell housing holes to get it aligned. Perhaps some one with better access to measurement tools and skills could modify it - the best idea I have heard is to place the gearbox on a mill then read off the XYZ coordinates of each hole. The tricky bit is getting the centre correct, as the gearbox input shaft is recessed from the plane of the bell housing holes.

The detailed plan we developed is in checklist format, it might be useful for your EV conversion. We have also costed the parts on a spreadsheet, which also has pages for weight distribution calculations for EV#1 and EV#2.

Articles on our Electric Vehicle

Check out my many blog posts on Electric Vehicles. Recent posts include drives in commercial EVs such as the MIEV and the Tesla!

Taking the MPs for a spin in the EV: My Federal and State MPs get introduced to Electric motoring

Low Cost EVs: March 2009 Renew Magazine article - please post you questions and comments on the article here.

Living with an Electric Car: Put yourself in the drivers seat of an EV

evalbum entry: Lots of pictures and technical specs

Building an Electric Car Part 1

Building an Electric Car Part 2

EV Tales: Vaporising wires and the EV rescues a petrol car!

Presentations

I have made a couple of presentations on EVs. My current passion is getting more low cost EVs on the road:

How to Build an Electric Car, Linux S.A. October 2009

Low Cost EVs, AEVA S.A. Jan 2009

Links

Here are some links to some great conversion web sites and Blogs. Lots of very useful information if you are interested in an Electric Vehicle conversion.