2008-06-23: The start of my EV conversion project. After about three years of poking around on the web and reading about all the people converting their Internal Combustion Engines to run from electricity instead of gasoline I have committed to doing a conversion of my own. Many people have heard me talk about my dreams and the process is beginning. What follows is a declaration of my goals, both initial and eventual.
Initial Goals: I hope to create an electric vehicle that will:
Handle my daily commute to work.
This should be an easy accomplishment. I live in a small mountain town and my commute, although across town, is on the order of about ten miles.
Provide reliable transportation up to 45 minutes each way (with no charging between).
Further limited by an average speed of 45mph, which works out to be ~66 miles round trip. I want to be able to drive my electric car wherever I would usually drive my ICE car. Half hour or 45 minute trips out to the resivore are not weekly occourances but happen often enough to warrant this as a goal.
Have respectable acceleration.
Unfortunately my daily commute to work includes merging onto a short section of 55mph highway. The merge lane I use is not really short but it almost never allows for a rolling start. Specifically, I would like to be able to hit 60mph in 11 seconds - I am not looking for jaw dropping torque.
Be Cheap.
Both during build and maintenance. Though I have recently graduated from college, I am essentially living on a student budget. Furthermore I have read many EV-blog writeups and many of them start out with a large bankroll. Spending huge sums of money is not my style. I am in the market for cheap or free parts, tools, equipment, and a donor car. I have not set a price ceiling, but it is effectively zero. I want this project to be re-createable by anyone with basic mechanical skills.
Be as unique as possible.
I'd like the car to stand out. I want it to make a statement: Electric vehicles are viable, and here to stay. Maybe I will accomplish this by a unique donor car...or maybe just a scrolling LED sign on the back. Open to interpretation.
Eventual Goals: Call 'em dreams. Unrealistic or not, here they are:
Possess race-quality acceleration.
I grew up talking about horsepower and torque and zero-to-sixty times. There is a strong urge in me to build a machine that goes...and fast. I consider this to be achievable but not necessary.
Be able to commute for seven hours over mountanous terrain.
I live in Colorado. We have mountains. Big ones. I want to be able to drive from one corner of the state to the opposite corner in one day, without stopping to switch out batteries. I have though extensively about this goal and consider it to be both reasonable and necessary for the success of the electric car. I am not willing to comprimise the 'all-electric' nature of the vehicle in order to accomplish this goal. Other builders have created 'pusher-trailers' (remote controlled ICE pushing the EV from behind) and 'generator-trailers' (an ICE generator mounted on a trailer to provide extra Joules. I believe that the trailer approach is a good idea and I would like to put an extra bank of batteries on the trailer which would be connected to my on-board battery pack via cable.
I have not fully realized the plausibility of this goal.
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