Build Your Own Electric Car out of a Gas-Guzzler

1) Read everything you can find on the subject. If you'd rather see it for yourself instead of just reading words about it, you can get a video here of a pickup truck being converted, step by step, along with some neat tricks to make things fit and to make the batteries easy to reach;

2) Find somebody who's already done it to look over your shoulder;

3) Choose an appropriate donor vehicle (that's the gas-guzzler whose guts you'll be ripping out) that has the nice qualities of:

• Being fairly lightweight. Reverend Gadget at Left Coast Electric swears he can convert everything from a Hummer to a snowmobile, but then, he's the good Reverend Gadget, who's been converting gas vehicles to electric since Ben Franklin first got the dotty notion to fly his kite in a thunderstorm. You'll get most bang for your battery buck if you think "light and aerodynamic". What are the most popular types of batteries for electric vehicle use? I'll give you a hint: it's not NiMH or Lithium; )
• Possessing a manual transmission. This is first of all because a transmission is just not all that necessary with an electric motor; they won't stall if you start them in the highest gear, and they just don't operate the same way as that petrol-puffer does: they use a controller for the electric motor to go backward/forward slower/faster instead. An automatic transmission just takes a big chunk of the available motor energy and just TOSSES it right out the door...and who needs that? Also, the donor with a stick-shift may well be CHEAPER. That's just about NEVER a bad thing; )

Here's an article from Battery Powered Systems, aka Beepscom (They're a conversion-stuff company, I'll talk more about them in a minute) which talks about the kinds of things that will affect the range that your electric car can go: some you can control, and some you can't.

• Not being a rust-bucket. You're going to go to a certain amount of trouble and expense, here... so why put new guts into a rotting hulk? Also, you'll have an easier time finding parts for it later if you get one that's not more than ten years old.
• Having lots of room for batteries somewhere -- preferably NOT in the passenger compartment. You're going to want to be able to get to them fairly easily for maintenance or whatever, and you're going to want to be able to pin them down somewhere solidly, and you're going to want to distribute their weight fairly evenly. A pick-up bed is pretty darned handy for all this. BTW: Learn how to wire your batteries in series here.
• Not being so exotic that you'll never find replacement brakes except on e-bay. My uncle Chuck converted one of the first Subaru trucks (I didn't even know Subaru made trucks, did you?) to electric - picked it up for a song without a working engine. Great donor, right? No. The parts are practically impossible to get, and of course they won't be interchangeable with any other parts, like Toyota or whatever. Right?

...and he went out and got him a Zap Xebra pickup last week instead.
(Note the appropriate relationship of truck to fuel; )

4) Get yourself a conversion KIT. The kit has two basic components: The motor and the controller. Then after that, most kits come with a bunch of other stuff for mounting these to your car and electrical wiring, which you'll most definitely need!

You can get the parts separately, of course. But there are several reasons why getting a kit makes good sense:

• Because the components are already best for electric cars. (Uncle Chuck used, I think, some airplane DC motor or other. Boeing surplus comes to mind. It wasn't bad, and the truck ran for a long time, but...well, he's got the Zap pickup now, doesn't he?)
• The system's already been road-tested, it works.
• The parts are already designed to work together.
• It's already put together by people who know what they're doing.
• It already fits the dimensions of your car - you can tell them what you're converting and they'll sell you the appropriate kit.
• The costs are reasonable - they won't charge you an arm and a leg for a conversion kit.
• There are lots of little bits required - clips and bolts and meters and such for attaching your electric drive to your car and whatnot. The kit has all that stuff already, no searching around for just the right spacer.

The best prices I've seen so far on conversion stuff is at Beepscom, and they sell kits now! They sell just about everything else, too, from how-to books to motors and controllers to batteries... and even have a fledgling classified ad section so you can buy and sell used electric cars.

Read their frequently asked questions for a good discussion on motor types and some more about range. They've got a fairly unvarnished bias toward DC systems, you might notice; )

For a kit, three more companies with good reputations are Metric Mind, Electro automotive, or, if you're in BC, see Randy Holmquist at Canadian EV for a conversion kit.

5) Sell the engine out of your old car, and get rid of it before you start. This helps with cost, and you surely don't need it in the way while you're working. It also provides a nice "no-turning-back-now" motivator to get the project DONE and not procrastinate.

6) Get yourself a place to work. If you've got ten acres and a hangar, this isn't an issue. Skip ahead. For the rest of us, though, you want to make sure you've got sufficient (clean, dry, warm, well-lighted) space to pull the guts out, have them strewn all over, and replace with new guts.

7) Have a parts delivery plan. There's nothing more deflating than having your project stalled because the motor controller took three weeks to pass through customs from the Netherlands. Ideally, it would be nice if you could have all your stuff waiting for you before you begin, with plenty of space to put everything. Next best is having everything delivered exactly when you need it, and old parts sold off and taken away just in the nick of time. These logistical things won't take care of themselves, however. Plan ahead and avoid a headache. (Yep, that's a GIRL talking there, isn't it?)

9) Set aside a couple of weeks or so. There are those who say it can be done in a weekend, but they do rather a lot of them, don't they? The rest of us need time to figure things out as we go.

10) Do what the book says in the order given. Follow the directions. Use the tech support that comes with your kit.

11) Cultivate a mechanic-buddy. One, because electric cars have a way of converting their converters, and another electric-drive fanatic is always welcome; and two, because you never know when you might need the help (or tools).

12) Blog, for heaven's sake. If you are doing a conversion and you register it with EValbum and let folks know you're doing it, you will get all the assistance, advice, and sometimes DISCOUNTS on parts that you could ask for.

On that same vein, you might visit the folks at DIY Electric Car Forums to find help or share your experience.

Now, I've got to introduce yet another cute boy named Gavin (not my Gavin this time) from New Zealand who is converting a Mitsubishi Tredia from gas to electric, and has built a website called kiwiev.com with pictures and a series of videos so you can see his progress, one step at a time.

If HE can do it, with imported parts from the US (he had to install the pot box upside-down to fit a left-handed car?), a rusty old donor (which he carefully sanded, and painted, and sanded, and sanded...), odd New Zealand conversion laws, and no particular automotive expertise, so can YOU. Just jump in!

You've created an excellent website with very useful information that is presented in a simple, uncomplicated way.
- Shan, Bangalore

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