Electric Vehicles EVs

So long as you've paid your £9k a year for a degree.

In Boris's Brave New World, Unicorn spunk lickers are exempt from student loan repayment.

I'm guessing a very spendy conversion but as posted above there's some forumongers that should be able to help. I've been thinking about the same for my Saab 900 to justify the cost and work of doing a restoration on it. Can't see the point of pouring money into a car that i won't be able to use in the future. Guy Martin did an episode recently with some behind the scenes on a conversion company. Not really a fan of his but some cool conversions on show.

Yeah I'm expecting it to cost quite a bit but less than the cost of buying a new or used Tesla...

quite a bit but less than the cost of buying a new or used Tesla

If you already have a cheap run around (like i do) i find the supposed affordability of switching to an EV fairly laughable but there is a point of view that the resale value justifies the outlay if you can afford it. Doing a conversion is always going to be personal thing that will likely not have much resale value. Similar to heavily modified cars or overblown restorations you won't see much of that investment back so i'd want to be confident it's a keeper. I wouldn't be surprised if insurance premiums were a lot higher as well given the limited numbers of insurers that'll touch a conversion.

All that said if you find out more do share the info!

Can't see the point of pouring money into a car that i won't be able to use in the future

I think the chances of existing petrol/diesel cars being banned is pretty slim, if that’s your concern. It’ll only become politically feasible around the time there are too few of them for it to be worth bothering.

id.3 ordered for december delivery (just a 1-month lease again). Be interesting to compare with the kona - seems + charge speed and space but - range

1 month lease? I didn’t know they existed. Expensive?

Check out http://on.to

£550 for the month which includes insurance and power (free charging from shell, BP and instavolt)

Test driving a Zoe and an e up at the weekend. Looking forward to it (apart from the inevitable slimy salesman shpiel).
They really don't make it easy to book though. has taken ages to track them down.

I was quoted £10k to convert my Audi 80 using Nissan Leaf parts.

Out of interest, who with? Was that parts/kit only or with labour?

I’ll see if I can dig out the info it was a while ago.

First ride in an electric car last Friday.
VW ID3, 220 miles, north west London to Brixham, Devon.
We had a recharge stop at Portishead.
No opportunity to charge at destination so the Portishead charge 'to the brim' in 45 minutes gave the driver enough range to drive Portishead-Brixham-Portishead for the return journey.

We used the 45 minutes to have a comfort break, buy some groceries for the weekend away, and have a sandwich looking at Portishead Marina.

Main observation: surprising acceleration available at any speed, (we kept below 70 mph).
Made me wonder; we all subscribe to a speed limit.
Should there be an acceleration limit?

Should there be an acceleration limit?

This is something I've questioned. There are an awful lot of drivers out there who have very little control of their current cars. They are already too powerful for them - evidenced locally by the number of cars that seem to be able to get into serious accidents in the 20 zones, coming off roundabouts or negotiating corners. Almost all EVs have the ability to accelerate people into these situations a lot harder than before. I appreciate it's a big selling point, but there are so few people who can actually handle a fast car (or be trusted to use it sensibly) that I wonder if this is going to become a problem.

I am very much looking forward to seeing the electric version of the Great Wall pickup truck, I've read reports that it'll retail for around the same price of the ICE version... If that's the case put me down for a black one...

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Yes, far yoo many collisions, with other vehicles and street furniture caused by too much power under the right foot.
I'm also now wondering about braking distances.
Do VW, for example, fit the ID3 with an uprated set of disc brakes to account for that heavy slab of batteries under the floor, or just rely upon whatever is in their parts bin?

This is an interesting and relevant point. Even quite lowly EVs have terrific acceleration from rest — one of the posters over on the petrolhead thread (qv) mentioned how a Tesla driver had 'smoked' him from the lights in his mega-powerful V8 Mercedes. There are a lot of Tesla owners out there, a good number no doubt relatively unskilled.

What would you like to know? I work at an EV conversion company in The Netherlands so I can give you some answers.

They factor in regen, brakes in ev’s are used much less than in ice cars

When we put our solar car up for road worthiness testing we had to pass the brake tests with regen disabled. Because regen braking doesn't work when the battery is full it cannot be relied upon for emergency braking.

Where do I even start!

I suppose I'm just trying to get a better grasp on the options for acquiring DIY parts for a conversion to start with...

• Are Tesla motors the way to go (they seem to be from my research thus far... I think I'd like to go with an LDU in the back and either a second LDU or an SDU in front in order to retain AWD)
  
• Is direct drive off the motors the way to go? No gearbox?
  
• In terms of batteries that are currently available are the Tesla ones best? How do the Nissan Leaf ones compare? What would you consider to be the best option in terms of performance vs cost vs space? Can you mix and match different batteries to best suit available space?
  
  

I'm probably not even asking the right questions but I'm really only at the light bulb moment in terms of planning at the moment...

First of all, what’s your budget? The plug and play kit Chris @ ZeroEV just released for the Porsche 964 is around £60,000 with one ldu and a 5?kWh battery pack.
Tesla is the way to go if you want big performance. The drive units are sought after and are expensive. Ldu is around $7,500. Tesla batteries are harder to get as well; model Ss are being crashed less it seems and the model 3 batteries are useless for most conversions. ZeroEV and Electric Classic Cars use LG Chem modeles to build their 400V packs. In theorie you could mix n match but managing them will be close to impossible. Leaf modules are cheapish but quite large.
And can you package one or two drive units in your car without hacking the vehicle to bits? Because if not your only be able to register the car in a country like the US where the rules are lax.
Revolt just released a sollution for front Tesla motor, rear wheel drive. Should be enough for 3ish seconds to 62mph. Again, won’t be cheap though…

Tesla Model Y now available to pre-order in the UK. Delivery starts in Q1 2022.

Do you need the Forester to be 4WD? The 4WD builds I've seen are either using both front and rear Tesla drive units, or they're retaining the original transferbox/centrediff. If you can make do with front or rear drive only, you'll free up a whole load of space for battery.

For ideas, see projects section at https://openinverter.org/forum/