Let's build our own Electric Car

So I watched the movie "Who killed the electric car?" and I decided I wanted to buy one but who am I trying to kid? I can't afford an $80,000-$100,000.00 car. I also don’t want some dorky looking car that is made just for the city and only goes 23 miles and has a top speed of 45 mph. So what about building my own electric car and not waiting for Detroit or Japan. I'll go to the dump and get a car with no engine. Hopefully this will cost just few hundred dollars. Then I will buy the equipment to replace the engine with an electric motor. So then the question is what is available out there?

OK I have the shell of a car with no motor sitting in my garage ready for conversion, how much will this cost? Well going to this site: www.electroauto.com I find that I have two choices, a total DC power plant and control system, around $6000.00. But I am not through yet I have to purchase batteries at the tune of about another $1000.00 - $2000.00 depending on the amp rating and voltage of the battery. And these are just lead acid ones. So the grand total of just the parts not labor for installation is around $7000.00 - $8000.00. Not too bad when you consider the cost of a new vehicle. But I still have a lot of long nights ahead of me putting all this together, plus welding special mounting brackets in place in the engine compartment, then finding the room for all the lead acid batteries I will need to run this thing. So how many batteries is this? Well depending on the final voltage of 96VDC this will be 8 of these 12 volt monsters batteries or 12 if you need 144 VDC. So how many miles can I get on a charge? Well that depends on my driving habits. If I drive like a Franciscan nun out on a Sunday drive then about 60-80 miles per charge. If I have a lead acid foot and drive like a NASCAR race car driver, then it drops dramatically. The only good thing is that the cost of the electricity is equivalent to about 0.60 cents per gallon of gas. So there is at least a cost benefit to running on electricity.

Now for the AC drive system. Hey wait a minute, batteries are DC voltage and I am going to put an AC motor in the car. Does that mean I have to have an extremely long extension cord to run this thing with. Well thankfully no. It has batteries the lead acid variety or Lithium Ion but the DC current is converted extremely efficiently to AC voltage and it also allows for regenerative braking which recharges the batteries during braking. This the ground breaking system used on the EV1. So how much does this equipment cost? Well this starts at around $9000.00 dollars without batteries and so with lead acid batteries and using top end prices because we are using a high end converter, then I end up with a conversion price of around $11,000.00 when all said and done. Still I have a lot of installation work to do to get it all in and running plus possibly the cost of adaptors and other incidentals. Well we still don't get much more of a range than the DC system. Lithium Ion batteries are lighter and smaller and this would be a big plus, but 1000 batteries at $3.00 each from www.allelectronics.com will amount to $3000.00. This is a low estimate, because most designs are utilizing 5000-7000 Lithium Ion batteries. This would put the cost of the batteries alone at $15,000-$21,000 dollars. Now we might be talking about a final cost of around $24,000-$30,000 dollars.

I don’t know about you but I don’t have the extra money just sitting around for this kind of project. Well if I could cannibalize the parts and reuse them indefinitely then maybe this makes more sense. I think the motor and converter will probably last for the age of the car, but the batteries definitely won’t. Also in cold climes like Colorado in the winter, batteries loose there power when the temperature drops to around zero degrees. So is this really the most practical alternative for me living here in Colorado? Sounds like a good topic for another blog post.