Electric Vehicle Conversion Concise Tutorial
A majority of the electric cars on the road today are "home made" vehicles. People like converting their existing gasoline-powered cars to electric in their backyards and garages. Electric vehicle conversion is neither difficult nor easy, you can convert your car in an EV by following well-written manual.
You must decide what kind of motor, controller and batteries to be used and get them ready before start.
A typical conversion uses a DC controller and a DC motor. You need to decide what voltage the system will run at — typically anything between 96 volts and 192 volts. The voltage decision controls how many batteries the car will need, and what sort of motor and controller the car will use. The most common motors and controllers used in home conversions come from the electric forklift industry.
You can get a "donor vehicle" that will act as the platform for the conversion. Almost always, the donor vehicle is a normal gasoline-powered car that gets converted to electric. Most donor vehicles have a manual transmission.
You have a lot of choices when it comes to battery technology. The vast majority of home conversions use lead-acid batteries, and there are several different options:
- Marine deep-cycle lead-acid batteries (These are available everywhere, including Wal-mart.)
- Golf-cart batteries
- High-performance sealed batteries
The batteries can have a flooded, gelled or AGM (absorbed glass mat) electrolyte. Flooded batteries tend to have the lowest cost but also the lowest peak power.
Now, you can start, the following is the steps:
- Remove the engine, gas tank, exhaust system, clutch and perhaps the radiator from the donor vehicle. Some controllers have water-cooled transistors, while some are air-cooled.
- Attach an adapter plate to the transmission and mount the motor. The motor normally requires custom mounting brackets.
- Usually, the electric motor needs a reduction gear for maximum efficiency. The easiest way to create the gear reduction is to pin the existing manual transmission in first or second gear. It would save weight to create a custom reduction gear, but normally it is too expensive.
- Mount the controller.
- Find space for, and build brackets to safely hold, all the batteries. Install the batteries. Sealed batteries have the advantage that they can be turned on their sides and fitted into all sorts of nooks and crannies.
- Wire the batteries and motor to the controller with #00 gauge welding cable.
- If the car has power steering, wire up and mount an electric motor for the power steering pump.
- If the car has air conditioning, wire up and mount an electric motor for the A/C compressor.
- Install a small electric water heater for heat and plumb it into the existing heater core, or use a small ceramic electric space heater.
- If the car has power brakes, install a vacuum pump to operate the brake booster.
- Install a charging system.
- Install a DC-to-DC converter to power the accessory battery.
- Install some sort of volt meter to be able to detect state of charge in the battery pack. This volt meter replaces the gas gauge.
- Install potentiometers, hook them to the accelerator pedal and connect to the controller.
- Most home-brew electric cars using DC motors use the reverse gear built into the manual transmission. AC motors with advanced controllers simply run the motor in reverse and need a simple switch that sends a reverse signal to the controller. Depending on the conversion, you may need to install some sort of reverse switch and wire to the controller.
- Install a large relay (also known as a contactor) that can connect and disconnect the car’s battery pack to and from the controller. This relay is how you turn the car "on" when you want to drive it. You need a relay that can carry hundreds of amps and that can break 96 to 300 volts DC without holding an arc.
- Rewire the ignition switch so that it can turn on all the new equipment, including the contactor.
Once everything is installed and tested, the new electric car is ready to go!
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Department of Energy Opens Electric Car Stimulus Programs
The Department of Energy has begun accepting applications for two electric vehicle programs funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
The DOE has allotted $400 million to establish development, demonstration, evaluation, and education projects “to accelerate the market introduction and penetration of advanced electric drive vehicles.” Applications are due May 13.
And the DOE also is accepting applications for grants to support the construction of US-based manufacturing plants for building batteries and electric drive components and has made $2 billion available for that program: the Electric Drive Vehicle Battery and Component Manufacturing Initiative.
The grants represent the first two energy-related programs funded through the $787 billion federal stimulus package to take applications.
Both programs are through the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Office of Vehicle Technologies. The DOE has $32.7 billion in grant money to distribute from the federal stimulus package. That includes $5 billion for weatherization and $3.1 billion for state energy programs, $2 billion for advanced batteries manufacturing and $6.7 billion for energy efficiency and renewable energy, $6 billion for environmental management, $4.5 billion for electricity transmission technologies, $3.4 billion for fossil energy research and development and other provisions.
Million Vehicles on the Road by 2015
In accordance with New Energy Policy, President Barack Obama announced a $2.4-billion competitive grant program to make the electric vehicles more widely available.
On the second day of his tour of Southern California, President Obama highlighted his environmental jobs agenda with a visit to an electric-vehicle testing facility in Pomona, where he announced a $2.4-billion competitive grant program to make the electric vehicles more widely available.
In his low-key speech before about 100 Edison employees and students from nearby Village Academy High School, Obama highlighted his recovery plan, which he says would create 400,000 jobs in California, and expressed concern about the "devastating impact" of the foreclosure crisis on the state.
But he focused primarily on his proposals to create new jobs in green technologies and to reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil, noting that the U.S. is importing more oil than it was on Sept. 11, 2001.
"Even as our economy has been transformed by new forms of technology, our electric grid looks largely the same as it did half a century ago," Obama said. "So we have a choice to make. We can remain one of the world’s leading importers of foreign oil, or we can make the investments that would allow us to become the world’s leading exporter of renewable energy."
The president renewed his commitment to doubling the country’s supply of renewable energy over the next few years — including spending $11 billion upgrading the nation’s power grid to ease the delivery of renewable energy across the country, and $15 million to help develop green technologies such as solar and wind power, and new coal technologies.
As a receptive audience of engineers and workers cheered his plans, Obama pledged to put a million plug-in hybrid vehicles on the road by 2015, and highlighted his offer of up to $7,500 in tax credits for Americans who purchase electric vehicles.
The new $2.4-billion grant program, which would be part of his recovery program, would ask companies to compete for federal money to increase the manufacturing of batteries and parts used in the electric cars.
Before speaking to the crowd gathered on the factory floor of the Electric Vehicle Technical Center this morning, the president spent about 20 minutes touring the facility with Edison International’s CEO and a top engineer.
After viewing the company’s model for a "garage of the future" — where an electric car battery would be charged each night with energy drawn from solar panels on the garage roof — Obama toured the battery-testing center and questioned engineers about what government could do to help advance the technologies.
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Electric Car Conversion Manual
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