Conversion To E-car?

[Guest jwts]

Hi,

 

This may border on sacrilege in RHOCaR but has anyone built or converted to an electric kit car?

 

With the rapid rise in petrol prices I started thinking about how difficult it would be to convert a kit car to e-drive. It seems to me that most kit-cars with their light build and strong chassis could make an ideal basis for an e-car. Batteries in the front, motor where the bell-housing and gear box is.

 

If you had a petrol driven car that had been SVAed would it need to be done again if you changed the drive system?

 

Total top-of-the-head blue-sky rambling but has anyone done it or given it serious thought?

 

Coincidentally I’ve just reached the fitting the tank and fuel lines stage .

 

Regards,

 

John (jwts).

[Guest chris brown]

but has anyone built or converted to an electric kit car?

Yes there was one at Stoneleigh expensive through

[agent_zed]

nothing wrong with electrickery there is a car based on a lotus elise (i think) that is electric and its pretty quick, faster than a lot of petrol engines. It would be cool to do a hybrid type thing. As for SVA once you are through i believe it is like any other car as long as you dont change the chassis you can plonk anything you like in to power it. I was reading about electric cars a while ago and it seems that some people have used the start motors off of planes as they are huge, how successful they are i dont know. The control box seems to be the most expensive bit.

[Mitch]

what about lpg??, how much would t cost to convert a hood?

 

Mitch

[Guest Guy]

Well I've been thinking of doing this as my next project, here are just a few of my thoughts:-

 

- You need a small car with good aerodynamics to make best use of the power that you have, something small like an MX5 would be good.

 

- If you have 20 12V batteries in series this will give you 240VDC, delivering 83amps you will dissipate 20KW in the motor, this is around 27 horsepower.

 

- A 3 phase induction motor is very efficient and you can get 20KW ones, you need a drive to convert the DC to 3 chopped phases at 120 degrees apart, this can control the power to the motor (I can design this part!!).

 

 

I know of a Bedford Rascle that was converted to electric, cost is around 5p per mile, TAX is free and you can don't pay a congestion charge LINK

 

I work in Cambridge and they are trying to get a congestion charge system started, this is why I was looking at electric cars.

[Guest Dan_Beeston]

Inverter drives are fairly cheap for AC induction motors (so you can control the speed of the motor) and available in a massive range of sizes.

 

They have a rectifier on the input stage but often have direct DC bus connections so you can chain drives together. Failing that just get inside and connect the batteries straight onto the DC bus.

 

They also come with lots of control options (CAN links, pots etc) so you could wire them straight to a potentiometer on the thottle pedal. You also get regenerative braking straight out of the box............................

[Guest timswait]

For SVA I think you might want to re SVA it. After all you can then register it as a zero emission vehicle, which I think is tax free (not 100%, can someone confirm?). I had also though a bit about this. Actually I was thinking of something of a plug in hybrid, so mains charged electric power most of the time with batteries to go about 40 miles, but with a small engine to charge the batteries if you need to go longer distances.

[Guest vacinc]

what about a pedal car ?

mini hood

[Joel]

Yes there was one at Stoneleigh expensive through

 

MEV's electric R2 - uses lithium iron phosphate batteries and delivers 500lb ft of torque from a standstill. Nice

[Snapperpaul]

I'm thinking of going Flintstone power

[philshelton]

was a ron champion book chassis at the show with elactic drive system layed out below. I asked how much for electric kit and was told £5000

[DAVE CASTLE]

yes but the battery pack was £10,000

Dave

[Guest salty_monk]

Batteries are defo the pricey bit.... not good for the planet either. I don't buy into the hybrid idea!

 

The cheapest would be lead acid but regular car batteries are not meant to be cycled & deep cycle "leisure batteries" are not meant to pass very much current (using one as a regular battery would kill it).

 

Difficult all round. Theirs a South African Entrpreneur developing one over here that promises to be incredibly fast... he's sold the first batch already for about $140,000 I think (that's about 10p in ££ these days )

 

Dan

[Swan Jnr]

what about going diesel and running it on bio fuel?

 

VW and Merc engines are best for this (ie they work well without any mods) and will hapily run on mainly vegetable oil with no mods. some others might need a heat exchanger to pre warm the oil in cold weather to avoid dodgy starting.

 

if you go the heat exchanger route, set up costs are pretty low and theres nothing too dodgy about it; you can if you wish register with the gov and send them the tax for the fuel you have used. only problem with this is that its impossible for them to tell what mix of normal diesel and vege diesel you have used. so you could reasonably send them the tax for the £10 worth of bio disel you've used when you'd actually used much more. if ever stopped by the police theres no way for them to tell this is your first tank of vege diesel or your 50th that month. in theory anyway. this is i guess where the inherant evilness of your tesco club card becomes clear, since they could prove that you'd been buying 100 litres of finest vegetable oil every month!

 

use cash!

[Guest timswait]

what about going diesel and running it on bio fuel?

 

VW and Merc engines are best for this (ie they work well without any mods) and will hapily run on mainly vegetable oil with no mods. some others might need a heat exchanger to pre warm the oil in cold weather to avoid dodgy starting.

 

if you go the heat exchanger route, set up costs are pretty low and theres nothing too dodgy about it; you can if you wish register with the gov and send them the tax for the fuel you have used. only problem with this is that its impossible for them to tell what mix of normal diesel and vege diesel you have used. so you could reasonably send them the tax for the £10 worth of bio disel you've used when you'd actually used much more. if ever stopped by the police theres no way for them to tell this is your first tank of vege diesel or your 50th that month. in theory anyway. this is i guess where the inherant evilness of your tesco club card becomes clear, since they could prove that you'd been buying 100 litres of finest vegetable oil every month!

 

use cash!

You don't need to anymore. The goverment's just changed it so you can use upto (I think) about 500 litres (maybe gallons, can't remember the figure, but it was roughly enough for an average annual mileage) for personal use without having to declare it. My mate had an old Merc he converted to run on pure vegetable oil. Heat exchanger to pre warm the oil and a solenoid valve to switch between diesel and vegetable oil, so you start and stop the engine on diesel and when the temperature reaches 70 you switch over to the oil. It even had a "Frybrid" sticker on the back Unfortunately the Merc is now dead. Knackered injector pump Whether this was down to the 5 or 10 thousand miles he'd driven on vegetable oil or the over a quarter of a million miles the car had already done on diesel is anyone's guess.

On an enviromental note biofuels aren't the answer to all our energy needs, at best they may be part of the solution. They still emit CO2 (fertiliser production, transportation, refinery, etc), the best estimates are that biodiesel emits about 20% the CO2 of fossil fuel, and bioethanol emits about 70% the CO2 of regular fossil fuel per mile after everything's taken into account. The other big problem is finding space to grow them. There simply isn't enough farmland on the planet, it's thought the main reason for the current rise in grain prices is the US pushing biofuel production so land being turned over to grow fuel rather than food.