I think max will be 100 mile round trips....it'll be a summer car to take out on sunny days. Performance is not important (original engine is 1.0L 70 BHP I think!)...ULEZ (London) is important in the sense that it's just the thin end of the wedge I think.....in 5-10 years it'll expand to the M25 maybe?
I personally think that the best way we can reduce our environmental impact is to maintain and reuse stuff we have already. The whole concept of buying stuff and then throwing it out after 2-3 years is just insane I think....hence this project is maybe a way of adding like to a car that might otherwise go in the bin.
Is electric inevitable?...will new emission rules ultimately end petrol/diesel I wonder?
I also feel for the money involved in the conversion and weight added there’s a negative gain. As the yanks say there’s no substitute for cubic inches
Plus the noise, smell SOUND and surge or power that can be topped up in minutes unlike an electric car with hours of battery charging and the damage it makes to the world mining for the batteries, coal fed power stations and a short life on the batteries plus questionable life span on a motor.
Personally I a petrol head and I love the sense of occasion if starting something special up, the smell, sight and most importantly sound it suggests in your soul
Iv driven teslas and used the stupid named modes yet they don’t envoke the sense of emotion a petrol engine does inside me. Setting your eyes on a car should make you feel like a 7 year old, you want it on your bedroom wall. It should distract you at work thinking of it.
I will never feel like that over a golf cart
Same goes for rudolf burners. Why have a large bhp engine that a petrol engines produces the same figure and uses the same fuel amount
I'm with you on all of the above...I'd never convert a V8 or V12...just too much of a joy I think.
The car I'm thinking of is a 1.0L Turbo (Nissan Figaro)....so the sense of occasion really comes from how the car looks not the engine or its performance. Its a bit of a noddy car so I think the electric conversion would really fit with the car.
This was the conversion I was reading....he almost got it off the ground and was scuppered by regulations and inspection fees.
Rudolph diesel the farther of powering buses and lorries @Pigeon_Droppings2 I kind of see what your doing but the cost involved for the gains are not worth it
Plus youl spend a large amount on battery’s then do the same again when they inevitably fail
Rwd it or put a modern turbo engine from a newer Nissan in there
Yea it's definitely a bit of a folly....it's basically a way of making the second restoration a more interesting project to be honest. I need challenging projects to keep my brain from thinking about work!
Agree on the batteries....and thats the reason I have not bought into electric yet. What worries me is that each pack basically has a limited number of charge cycles....but I think they are now getting to the point where the number of cycles might begin to make some sense.
I'm guessing the key is to have lots of extra battery capacity so you rarely get to 100% discharge (downside is the weight of course!)....allows you squeeze out more miles per charge cycle. I reckon if the maths supported something like 200,000 miles from a set of batteries that wouldn't be too bad.
Some interesting statistics about real-world lithium-ion battery life and number of charge cycles:
This is from a dealer who specialises in used EVs, and is about a car they recently bought in. It was a Nissan Leaf - the most popular ( and most ugly ) electric car:
First registered 2015, it has covered 120,000 miles, which is very high for an EV.
Actual battery voltage is 378v, actual capacity is 56.9 Ah. Original ( new ) capacity was 66 Ah. So the state of health ( SoH ) is 87%, which represents a 1% battery degradation per 10,000 miles travelled.
The battery has 192 lithium cells, arranged as a series string of 96 units, each is 2 cells in parallel ( 96S2P ). Lowest unit 3.924v highest 3.950v average 3.938v, so the maximum cell difference is only 26mV.
The most interesting data ( all stored on-board ) concerns charging: the car has been rapid-charged 4224 times. That is at public charge points, using 500v DC at 125A ( the CHAdeMO system ), which can provide an 80% recharge in about half an hour.
It's now been sold. I don't know what the price was.
You are probably not that far away from getting there,
I am using info from the cordless bosch li-ion power tools battries but they are saying you should get 2000 charge cycles before the battries loose performance.
For your 200,000 miles that means you need a pack capable of running 100 miles on each charge which should be fairly realistic I think.
You just need to do the maths and see how much power you need to do 100miles and how much it's going to cost to build a pack that size.
Li-ion is a lot more expensive but a lot lot lighter.
Unlike petrol you still have to carry the dead weight of the power you have used. So, by the time you have done 50miles you are just carrying half the battery pack around as dead weight.
If you have a 25kg petrol tank and put 100l of fuel in and then weighs 125kg you have the most fuel available at the point you are most loaded and then you get lighter as you go along saving fuel as you go.
A battery pack that weighs 125kg at 3.5v per cell is still going to weigh 125kg empty.
Also, it might be that 3.2v is considered empty hence why you need to carry such a large weight in cells for not a lot of performance.
On the upside, you can dump all of the fuel from a battery into the motor at once so you get massive gains over a petrol engine that has to build up the power delivery. You can then either gear the motor for huge acceleration or long range or to suit whatever you want to do with the car.
If you were only going to work and back every day it would make sense to have one 50mile pack at work and one 50mile at home and swap over.
Maybe have a spare 10mile pack in the car in case you want to pop to the shop on the way home.
I think the main problem is still the price of the battries, I haven't looked at the price of bare cells but I know the power tool packs are not dropping in price at all for the latest tech and there is still a mid-range sweet spot to the pricing. I suspect the same thing will apply to bare cells so it might be best to price up the battery first of all, then see what range it will give you and see if it's feasible yet or if you are going to have to wait another 10 years!
If you are not scared of exploding you could look at buying a pack from a crashed car.
If a tesla can do 200 miles on its pack and half of the pack is damaged that should give you the 100mile range you need.
Some quick maths using eddie49's post.
The cheapest way to buy bosch battery power comes out at about £9.50 for 1ah in an 18v battery pack.
So, to get the 66ah on a new leaf pack would cost you (9.5x66) £627.
That would give you a 66ah 18v pack.
To get 378v would be (378/18) 21 lots
So 627x21= 13,167.
So, just over £13,000.
However, I bet if you wanted to buy that many at once You could get 25% discount bringing you sub £10k.
That's obviously including all the plastic cases, control circuitry, packaging and so on plus the premiums for a bosch name and the fact that they are a dedicated product for expensive power tools.
If you could buy the bare cells for half that or less somewhere around £4-5k is starting to look doable on a 10k project budget.
If you could do it in several packs that can be plugged in as needed you could start with a sub £1k pack build to test with. You could then spend out on a couple of big packs once you new the project was working correctly and the little first pack you made would become your reserve/emergency pack.
I do agree about the thrill of a large petrol engine though!
I have a lotus 7 style with a big v8, there is nothing that compares to climbing over the side, strapping yourself into the bucket seat, taking 5 mins to start it up with the various combination of setting the ecu map, priming the fuel pumps and the extended cranking time before it coughs and splutters into life and sits there shaking with the pops and bangs from the side mounted pipes right next to you.
I also got to go to the le-mans 24hr last year in a 8.4l big block Chevy cobra replica . I don't expect we went over 50mph at all but what a ride!
However, tesla have got 0-60 times of 2.5 seconds.
About the same as the average on the formula one grid in 2016.
Ok the tesla is £100k or so but it's a 7 seat family salon. Not a £? single seat monster.
Another thing that impressed me,
The first tesla s had a 0-60 of something like 5.2seconds.
They sent out a software update, over-the-air to drop this to 4.5 or so.
Another update took another second off.
The ludicrous update took it down to 2.5.
The only thing the owner has to do is click 'accept' to install the update.
Its free, it's downloaded while you sleep.
If I wanted to shave 1 second off the 0-60 of my 7 style its probbaky going to cost me £10k and a week off the road.
To shave another second off that is going to be exponentially more. Probably £50k and a month in the workshop.
To do it a third time is going to be a gound-up redesign and rebuild of pretty much everything except the numberplate.
They did it just by flashing some software.
I'm impressed by some of the electric stuff about!
Looks like they sell the Tesla battery modules....5KWh is around $1600. I haven't done the maths but maybe 6 of them would be needed.
I might have a go at doing the numbers...one thing I was trying to work out is whether the electric motors have a sweet spot rpm/efficiency which needs to be factored in to any design?
Regarding the required battery capacity: the Renault Zoe uses 323 Wh per mile, the Citroen C-Zero uses 300 Wh, and the BMW I3 260 Wh per mile.
Obviously consumption will increase with speed, wind resistance, weight of vehicle, terrain, using lights, heater, A/C, and in winter - when battery performance will be lower too. So a 20 KWh battery in that type of small vehicle will give you a range of 60 to 70 miles.
( You get the KWh value, of course, by multiplying the voltage of the pack by the AH rating of the cells. For example, the Citroen C-Zero pack is 330v, made of 88 x 3.75v cells at 50AH each - they're big ones, not 18650 tiddlers, so 330 x 50 = 16.5 KWh capacity. )
The motor power required will depend on the weight of the vehicle and the performance expected. I guess 30 to 60 HP would be a starting point ( 22 to 45 KW ). Series-wound DC motors run about 5,000 rpm max, AC motors driven by an inverter can do 10,000 to 15,000 rpm.
I know it 's a vanishingly small niche market, but how about an electric sidecar outfit. The extra batteries it could carry would greatly extend the range and keep the chair down.
Bit of a thread resurection here, but seems like the most logical place to put it!
Theres been quite a few threads on ev technology but i saw this post on fb yesterday in a similar discussion on EV conversions.
Quote[ Jonathon Heap
My issue with electrifying classics or indeed any non original electric car is the cars structure. Most early classics are small , as with the Minor. The structure of the car dictates that batteries are located in the engine bay and boot, old tech batteries weighing around 250 kilos front and rear. Proper electric cars have the battery cells mounted low and between the axles, in a specially constructed safety cell which is often cooled and packaged in a 'safe' manner. So a Minor involved in a traffic jam shunt, has none of the required protection and is a deadly fire waiting to happen. With it taking almost 2 days for a Tesla to burn out its batteries, what hope for a budget built electric Minor and its occupants. As for the argument of 'clean energy' we all know the carbon foot print of electric cars, the devastation caused through mining, social and economic 'slavery' of those workers mining these precious materials etc etc.]Unquote.
Jonathon heap runs JLH morris minors & is one of the best moggy specialists in the business.
I would add to this that lithium batteries can fail in quite low impacts & once they do a serious fire is a very real possibility. If you have put battery modules in the front, in the boot effectively either end of where the occupants sit they will be the first things to get bent in a shunt.
My son tested a lithium battery module recently that caught fire catastrophically. It took three fire applicances to contain it. Note contain as they could not put it out. This was just one module from what would go into a car.
I suspect that many of the conversions that are starting to appear will be death traps in a crash
I see wholesale changes to car ownership in the not too distant future. Whilst it is difficult to integrate autonomous cars into the current road system, it would be relatively easy to have a system where all cars are driverless and there is no chance of human driver error. Currently the average car spends over 95% of its working life rusting away in a parking spot, I forsee a future where most people don't own a car, they just summon a car, van, MPV etc using an app on their phone. Once they've finished using the vehicle it would simply drive itself to the next job. This system would make most car parks, driveways etc redundant and would free up a lot of prime real estate.