41 replies to this topic

[green76ra23]

I have always wanted an Austin Ruby.
But lately I have been thinkin of making a electric car
Has anyone tried making an electric car

[phr34kr]

I know of someone putting one of these 12Kw brushless electric motors into an aluminium space framed off road go kart. 100Nm of torque.
http://www.robotmark...MACDSBL350.html
(If thats not enough power he said he would buy another one and run two motors)
He's planning on getting a large li-ion battery pack for it and then aiming to get it road registered.
Its not a cheap exercise, but should be a load of fun once finished.

[green76ra23]

Thanks that looks really good
The ruby only came out with 13hp and I just want it for round town use.

[BZG-Bling]

What is your budget? Building an electric car is not cheap, or close to it. I wanted to do it as well, but the cost was WAY more than i'd ever have to blow on such an idea.

[Simon]

We have an Electric Civic in the work shop. Guy has spent bucket loads and is still spending bucket loads and it won't even do 100.

You can buy a lot of fuel for the price it costs to convert...

[theshrew]

http://electricfastback.wordpress.com/

check it. this allways came up when i was searching stuff about type3s, its a mean write up if you can be bothered reading it.

[kyteler]

www.diyelectriccar.com

[Vintage Grumble]

My brother inlaw did a lot of calculations and pricing, as he was going to do this to his old kp60. He came to the conclusion that it was a huge waste of time, money and effort.

[slacker.cam]

With the Lithium batteries you can get now it's not a waste of money and effort if you are willing to make a large initial investment and do most/all of the work yourself. The thing you have to be aware of with an EV conversion is that you're effectively trading the cost of petrol for the cost of wear on the battery pack (plus the electricity to charge it up every night). You will need to buy a new battery pack say every 5 years due to wear and tear so if you save enough by not buying petrol in that time then you're winning. Lithium battery technology is coming along in leaps and bounds at the moment - there's a shitload of R&D going into the technology and because of this the price per unit of battery capacity is dropping steadily. In addition to this the batteries are able to go through more charge cycles before wearing out. AND we have a strong dollar at the moment. These factors are all in your favour.

If you can do the work yourself you will be able to convert a leightweight car for around $15k if you do it properly and don't skimp. This will get you a car that can do motorway speeds and have a range of at least 100km. If you want less range then that means less batteries so you start making cost savings. The payback period is however no short. With todays petrol and electricity prices it'll probably be more than 5 years but less than 10. Obviously as petrol prices increase your payback period reduces, but on the other side of the coin you have to expect that electricity costs will increase too. The more KMs you do per year the more you save too so you can't really put an accurate number on the payback period without much more information.

If you are keen to do a conversion be prepared to spend at least a year doing all the work. Maybe more if you work slowly or need to wait for funds to become available. If you want to pay someone to do the work for you it'll probably multiply your payback period by 1.5 or 2 times due to the labour cost.

EVs are super sweet. There are a number of them driving around NZ that are more than capable of doing motorway speeds. There is a guy in Clevedon who drives a converted Celica from his place to Coromandel township on a charge without batting an eyelid. That's super impressive in my book.

Source: I spent 2 years designing a range of high voltage EV chargers and have worked with Australias largest EV conversion company on a project converting 10 cars to electric for the Perth council. Also have been invloved around the extremity of a couple of DIY conversions here in NZ.

[Llama]

The electricity to charge it is sweet bugger all, the biggest ongoing cost is replacing the batteries.

If you are good with mechatronics and control systems, I'd recommend going for two motors with one driving each wheel (or 4 if you really wanted to go overkill). That way you get traction control without having to worry about diffs and stuff.

[Simon]

If you are good with mechatronics and control systems, I'd recommend going for two motors with one driving each wheel (or 4 if you really wanted to go overkill). That way you get traction control without having to worry about diffs and stuff.

Also you don't need power steering if you can steer with the rear a bit.

And yeah, battery technology is very exciting.

They have just made breakthroughs with lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) discovering that they like higher operating temps and the like being shocked with current while charging.
By taking the normal lithium structure and crushing it into nano particles the cells somehow last much longer because of the way the smaller particles resist degrading.

The hard thing is cell management. The batteries need to be cared for very precisely while being charged and discharged to get the most out of them / stop them from dying.

Super capacitors are also awesome, although only really useful on a drag strip haha.

[Borgweiser]

Please don't electrify a Ruby, the motor is the best part. Hard to get any more economical than a 750 motor and easily tuneable for power

[sentra]

im bicurious,

electricity right, super cheap, put it in car, horay, dolphins, eco freindly, horay,
why is this?

everything we were taught in pleb school goes against this being a good idea?
1: dinosours are extracted from ground.
2: they are burned and converted via heat to electricity. as far as what we learned,
this was a terribly inefficient conversion??? (worse than efficiencys seen by modern
cars?)??
3: it is put into a cable in ?? and pushed to auckland
4: it loses a massive amount in line loss on the trip?? i know nothing of this subject??
but it is in the 20+% region?
5: it is rectified and pushed into a battery, again an inefficent process??
6: car runs.

I understand the whole grid balancing thing, which seems to be a load of spank
to just not build out good real infrastructure,

but i just cant see why doing the above is -cheaper- than just burning the shit
in the car? logic says small scale would be where efficencys are found in
turning dinosaurs into motion?.

but the real world as of today says, 1unit of motion from dinosaur = $1 and 10units of motion from wacky back and forth conversion process of the same dinosaur = $1

sources: steinlager and flounder.

[Roman]

Yeah but you get economy of scale at a powerstation, and they can burn vodka soaked undies rather than requiring a highly refined fuel like vehicles do. (The process of which, creates emissions I guess?)

There's also the overheads of distributing gasoline, you're burning diesel just to take tank loads of diesel/gas/etc to the gas stations, and think how many kms get driven where people specifically just drive to a gas station.

All of these overheads could be eliminated with a widespread electric car setup.

Also from the point of view of controlling emissions, it's likely more efficient dealiing with one output at a powerstation, rather than millions of smaller ones with varying degrees of effectiveness in petrol powered cars.

Even if ultimately electric cars broke even against petrol cars on dinosaurs consumed, it would be beneficial in a lot of indirect ways.

[felixx]

and the fact most of NZs power is generated by hydro dams

[Simon]

And the ones that do burn fossil fuels don't run on petrol but burn coal, which is basically useless for anything else.

Also, burning fossil fuel to produce heat (to make steam for turbines) is basically 100% efficient where as burning fossil fuel to produce mechanical motion (piston) is only like 20% efficient, with 80% being wasted as heat.

[Borgweiser]

So basically in summary, make the Ruby steam powered and cut out the middle man?

[sentra]

And the ones that do burn fossil fuels don't run on petrol but burn coal, which is basically useless for anything else.

Also, burning fossil fuel to produce heat (to make steam for turbines) is basically 100% efficient where as burning fossil fuel to produce mechanical motion (piston) is only like 20% efficient, with 80% being wasted as heat.

Understand the cant put coal/gas/hydro/nuke/etc in a car thing, and this seems to be
the leading cause for electric cars, and environmental benefits being a joke?
(but a good selling point as it technically "could" be true)
(this is a perfectly acceptable reason to do something)

combustion process being 100% efficient is a broken statement, as a
car engine is also 100% efficient at changing energy state,
im sure the electrical generator whatever it may be is not very efficient at turning
x energy into electrical energy,
source: my bum.

transmission losses in electricity compared to? negligible losses in transporting dinosaur
directly. highly doubt distributing electricity is more efficient than distributing dinosaur,
source: my bum.
any figures from anyone knowledgable about power transmission?
distributing dinos transmisson loss is easy, bizzo how much diesel does the truck use?

74%? (wikipedia) of nzs energy is hydro/geothermal as of today, (& dropping?)
if we electrified our fleet, realistically how many dino-hp's would be generated
by hydro? zero? our current renewable capacity has no room for cars?
dont see govt quadrupling our amount of dams.
source: my bum.

i dont really care that it is generated by coal/gas/etc and have no agenda,
just want to learn an unbiased opinion, everybody who talks knowledgeably
about this subject in the media etc allways has a huge agenda/bias which sucks
source: asked liv which is better, electric or dino & why?
"electric, better for the enviroment"

[Simon]

What exactly are you trying to figure out?

Environmental aspects are not quite as funny when you have governments subsidising anything that is carbon neutral so they don't have to pay carbon tax / credits.

combustion process being 100% efficient is a broken statement, as a
car engine is also 100% efficient at changing energy state

I don't really get what you mean here. Yes IC engine transforms all the energy, however you don't buy a car to be a heater. You buy a car to move you places. Therefore you only use 20% of the input. The rest is wasted. At the power station, most of the input is used for the purpose it's intended to - heat water.

There is also the fact mentioned by Felix that most of the power generated is basically free. There is no input cost other than initial set ups as water is free etc. Nuclear is very cheap. The largest consumers of the world are not using coal for power generation.

At the moment it's not cheaper to have an electric car, but given a few years with technology advancements and increasing price of oil, it is looking more like cars / what ever the future version of a vehicle is will run on electricity. It't not even worth reading journals that are more than 2 years old because the technology is going so fast.

I used to think naaah, it will be hydrogen in internal combustion engines... But with the way they are hammering battery development at the moment and the way in which they are seeing massive improvements, there is no point keeping alive a motor that is only 20% efficient when you can have 90% efficiency in electric motor (that is looking at input vs output, petrol needs refinement just as much as electricity needs generating). Add regenerative breaking in electric motor vs kinetic energy wasted to heat in petrol car and the need to make electricity before you can make hydrogen, Electric vehicles start to look much better.

Keep in mind, to fill a tank in an IC car may cost $100 in petrol and it will do a certain distance. Put beside it an electric car that can do the same distance but only cost $5 to "fill the tank".
At the moment, it costs more than the $95 you save to keep an electric car providing the same service as the petrol one with the likes of degeneration of batteries etc. But once it gets close to the point of being equal, we will see more and more electric cars. Then we will see more infrastructure - battery swap stations, smart grid charging technologies etc. It's already happening. Not so much in NZ but over seas yes. Especially Asia.

If you gave the average person a choice of electric car and petrol car, both with exactly the same running costs / performance over it's life time, most would choose the electric one.
They are much smoother, quieter, no more trips to the petrol station, much less maintenance as there is only one moving part in an electric motor, etc etc... Hell people are doing it now with the concept EV's on the market like the Prius.

Remember fossil fuel is not a renewable resource so a lot of this is coming out of necessity as well as convenience for customer / making money for product owners.

I can't really comment on transmission lines etc, maybe Tom for that lol. But I do know that with the current power transmission lines / systems there is only enough space for like 5% of the cars in NZ to go electric. The grid could not cope with 2 million cars coming home at 5.30 and drawing 300 Amps all at once.

[sentra]

Simon, thanks for spending the time on your well written reply,
I guess im trying to qualify the statement (i dont necessarily 100% agree with it)

"running a car on electricity is far less efficient than running it directly on refined dinosaurs,
but is worthwhile because of current electricity price structuring, and without including
the issues with storage, also has a worse effect on the environment".

the realities of it being that there is no hydro power available in required quantity,
new zealand will not build nuclear generation within the next hundred years even
if 100% proven technically sound, so its coming from fossil fuels...

$ per btu if you just wanted to build a cheap+fast car, put the coal directly in the car?
as of today, (not tomorrow), consensus is electric repower is a not very good idea?
when considering for "tomorrow" be mindful of other emerging technologies alongside
batterys, a good example being massive scale richard branson backed algae plant
development here in NZ of all places, if that technology scales as "hoped", electric
car/storage development would be put on the backburner for 20+ years.

the near 100% efficency on c.p.e to steam is correct, but steam doesnt go in the wire,
and im going to pick a number from the sky and say that steam to e.p.e conversion is in
the 20% range. (logic says if it was better, we would run cars on steam turbines?)

- Dave.