Electric vehicles-Conversions

[RichardW]

GS: http://www.evalbum.com/868

CX (not great video):

[Peter.N.]

I ran CXs for about 10 years, can't imagine one as electric - but why not, amazing cars.

Peter

[white exec]

CX (or the like), Peter, would be ideal for carrying all that battery weight!

Interesting that a good few of these conversions retain the gearbox, which seems a shame. Where the car is FWD, I can see the thinking, because of the built-in diff. For RWD, I see that several folk have simply attached the motor directly to the rear diff, or the propshaft.

For FWD, a pair of motors (one for each wheel) would seem an elegant way to go - no need for a diff at all.

I read somewhere, years ago, that in the case of electric motors, efficiency and power-weight-ratio increased as the motor got smaller. Another reason to go for two smaller ones?

Just wish I had the budget to play around with all this. An ideal club or evening class project!

[Mandrake]

Will be very interesting to see what happens when mainstream electric cars gradually come on to the used/secondhand market. I suspect depreciation will have been massive.

As opposed to what - Citroen's ?

I say that with love...

[CitroJim]

Will be very interesting to see what happens when mainstream electric cars gradually come on to the used/secondhand market. I suspect depreciation will have been massive.

As opposed to what - Citroen's ?

I say that with love...

I howled at that Simon

I couldn't put it better myself!

[Mandrake]

I howled at that Simon

I couldn't put it better myself!

Us Citroen owners know how to take advantage of high depreciation by being on the right end of it! If the same happens with electric cars then that's all good for us bargain hunters!

People buying new cars keep forgetting a car is a liability not an asset...

[CitroJim]

People buying new cars keep forgetting a car is a liability not an asset...

Never a truer word spoken Simon...

I love being at the very end of the depreciation curve Long may there always be one...

[Mandrake]

I don't think depreciation will be as bad as feared with electric cars though.

The big fear of course is the batteries - will they last more than 10 years and if you happen to buy one at 11 years old and the battery goes kaput, are you stuck with a massive bill of >£10,000 to replace the battery on a car you paid £2000 for...

Although no "modern" electric cars like the Tesla are over 10 years old yet, early signs suggest that with proper battery management systems (particularly regulating and controlling the battery temperature as the Tesla's take great pains to do, while some other electric cars don't!) the battery life is actually far in excess of that expected.

There are some Tesla model S's now that are 4 years old and have done well over 100k miles with no real battery degradation yet (a few percent of total capacity) and the battery system is extremely modular and possible to repair on a modular basis once the information on how to do so gets onto the 2nd hand repair market, which it is already starting to do so...

Also I think it will prove to be the case that electric motors and drive trains will be found to be much more reliable and less maintenance hungry than internal combustion engines + gearboxes, especially when you don't have to worry about oil and water, timing belt failure, carbon buildup in intake systems, torque converter clutches or manual clutch plates, turbo failures, exhaust systems, etc.... An electric motor and fixed ratio gearbox driving a conventional diff really is simple and elegant compared to a modern internal combustion engine with a plethora of emissions control equipment!

So that will tend to offset depreciation fears based on the batteries, once it is proven that the battery technology is actually a lot more reliable and long lived than first believed.

My real fear is actually the software! At the moment the diagnostic software and firmware upgrade process of something like a Tesla is absolutely locked down under Tesla control - once people have the wherewithall to repair a battery pack, a motor, a motor controller etc, will they have the software tools they need to be able to mate a repaired/replaced battery to the rest of the car for instance ? Or to be able to put the car into diagnostic mode at all ?

Interesting times, but it can't come soon enough for me. I am totally on-board the electric car revolution even though I've never driven one!

[CitroJim]

I'm right with you there Simon and I'm looking forward to when electric cars are old enough that we can economically get hold of them for peanuts and work out how to get a bit more life out of them as cheaply as possible...

Where there's a will there'll be a way for sure... There always has been... Software is a worry but again, that'll be worked around.

For most of my driving needs an electric car is just what I need right now... I'm not sure about the regular 300 mile round-trip I do to Somerset and back just yet but time and progress will see that good too...

But for me right now the economics don't stack up... Until buying and running an electric is as cheap as running a pair of Xantias then it won't happen for me - One thing that might prompt me is if the government attempt to tax old cars off the road. I can see them trying that on with old pre-DPF diesels in the not too-distant future given a groundswell of opinion they're very bad and should be banned from major cities... That could be their death-knell...

I reckon in ten years we'll all be running electrics and things like my Activa will be restricted to a very small annual 'heritage' mileage that will just about see then able to visit a few rallies. Cars like Gabriel I can see being banned outright from the roads...

We live in interesting times...

[myglaren]

My real fear is actually the software!

[Mandrake]

I'm right with you there Simon and I'm looking forward to when electric cars are old enough that we can economically get hold of them for peanuts and work out how to get a bit more life out of them as cheaply as possible...

Yep. At the moment buying any electric car is totally infeasible for me, but hopefully my income will gradually go up and prices will come down until the two meet somewhere in the middle! It's inevitable, just like I never believed 15 years ago that I could afford a Xantia V6 - now I can buy one for peanuts and have one! The same will eventually happen for decent spec electric cars. The largest source of depreciation in the UK is salt corrosion - that's still going to be an issue for electric cars too, although some like the Tesla are largely alloy body construction...

Where there's a will there'll be a way for sure... There always has been... Software is a worry but again, that'll be worked around.

I'm well positioned for eventual electric car adoption and maintenance - although I pretend to know what I'm doing on the mechanical side of cars, electronics, computers and software is right up my alley and what I actually know about! I think I'd find it easier to diagnose an electric drive train than a valve gear problem in a petrol engine as long as I had access to the necessary diagnostic tools...

For most of my driving needs an electric car is just what I need right now... I'm not sure about the regular 300 mile round-trip I do to Somerset and back just yet but time and progress will see that good too...

Me too. I now have a 20 mile a day commute that is killing me on petrol - sure I could go for a smelly polluting diesel and drop my fuel cost by half or maybe even to a 1/3rd but at the expense of the environment...and having to buy another unknown to me car with all its own problems... and then I'd have to drive a diesel. An electric car that I could plug in each night would be absolutely perfect for this daily commute.

On a big heavy 2400Kg Tesla you can fully charge it for about £5 of electricity at standard UK electricity rates and get 300 miles out of that, so it's 1/10th the cost of a petrol per mile and and still 1/3rd the cost of a diesel, amazing when you consider what a big car it is! On a much smaller electric car I'm sure the cost is far lower still.

An electric car is also well suited to slow and stop start rush hour traffic. Regenerative braking takes away a good part of the inefficiency of stop start traffic - every time I touch the brakes in a petrol/diesel energy is going to waste. If you can get say 80% of that back with regenerative braking stop/start traffic is no longer a penalty. The other issue of slow traffic is that electric cars are vastly more efficient at low speeds than diesel/petrol due to the fixed gear ratio on most electric cars.

Petrol/Diesel cars have a sweet spot for efficiency which is basically constant speed at the lowest speed you can comfortably pull in top gear. Go any faster and all forms of friction go up including windage (the biggest factor of all) rolling resistance, friction in the engine etc, as they would in an electric car.

But if you drive any slower (like 10-20mph) you are forced to go down a gear or two, the lower gear ratio raises engine RPM for a given road speed which means that for a given road speed you increase your frictional losses in the engine, which are largely due to engine RPM. A surprisingly high amount of energy waste in a combustion engine is friction due to things like camshaft load pushing valves up and down, accessory load, and of course piston/liner friction, all of which go up when you change down a gear. Furthermore on a petrol engine if you are in a low gear with a light throttle at higher rpm (1st/2nd in rush hour traffic) there is a lot of throttling loss from the engine trying to pump a vacuum against the throttle plate. (one reason a diesel is so much more efficient on light loads)

All of this conspires to worsen fuel efficiency dramatically on a petrol/diesel in slow stop start traffic. Not so on an electric car! Regeneration recovers most of the energy that would be wasted in slowing down and you actually get more miles per Kw/hr the slower you go as all sources of friction including the motor go down! Not only that, there is no engine idling to consume fuel when you're not even moving at all... Rush hour traffic will actually get you where you want to go with less energy consumption than driving there at 60mph the whole way...

As for range - the highest spec Tesla can now do 315 miles on a single charge - not estimated range, actual verified real world range... and on smaller electric cars over 200 miles is very feasible. Once you can start to do over 300 miles on a single charge as long as there are decent fast charging points on main trunk lines that can give you an extra 150+ miles charge in 30 minutes the range issue starts to go away.

Another 5 years I think and range/charging will no longer be an issue in the UK.

But for me right now the economics don't stack up... Until buying and running an electric is as cheap as running a pair of Xantias then it won't happen for me - One thing that might prompt me is if the government attempt to tax old cars off the road. I can see them trying that on with old pre-DPF diesels in the not too-distant future given a groundswell of opinion they're very bad and should be banned from major cities... That could be their death-knell...

Aren't several major cities in the EU already banning diesel cars completely from certain very large well known cities starting in 2025 ? I'm sure I read a news story about that recently. The writing is on the wall for private passenger diesel vehicles - the VW emissions scandals (which turned out to be most of the diesel car industry in actual fact) combined with the sudden uprising of cars like the Tesla which are paving the way for other marques electric vehicles will put the final nail in the coffin of diesel cars, and soon.

I for one would not be buying a new diesel car in this day and age!

I reckon in ten years we'll all be running electrics and things like my Activa will be restricted to a very small annual 'heritage' mileage that will just about see then able to visit a few rallies. Cars like Gabriel I can see being banned outright from the roads...

We live in interesting times...

The pace of development, acceptance and adoption has accelerated exponentially since about 2012 - whether you like Tesla or not you have to hand it to them for single-handedly giving the electric car market a huge kick in the backside by coming up with a very practical, desirable (albeit expensive!) car that can lead the way and make people WANT to buy an electric car rather than thinking that they should to save the environment. Make something that people WANT and they will buy it.

For years I've been interested in the concept of electric cars but it always seemed decades away, not due to technology (well, maybe battery technology) but due to politics, pricing, market resistance, oil company conspiracies etc... I thought by the time I retired (another 25 years or so yet) that maybe they would be starting to get popular.

Big surprise to me then that the electric car revolution is here right NOW! It snuck up while I wasn't looking. I think it would be reasonable to say that in another 10 years from now electric car sales will be on a par with petrol/diesel (especially when people find out diesels will be getting banned in many cities) and 20 years from now the majority of privately owned passenger cars purchased new will be electric.

There will still be a place for diesel engine in long haul freight for a while, petrol in motor racing and there will still be those of us trying to keep our classic petrol and (maybe?) diesel Citroen's on the road but the writing is on the wall I think...

[white exec]

I agree with all of that, Simon. The range issue is now largely sorted, and is academic, anyway, for almost all urban use and commuting. Offerings will multiply quickly now, not least from China.

Tesla deserve an international award for much of this, but we can still expect a backlash from Big Oil. Trump's appointment yesterday, I think, of an Exxon-Mobil CEO as his Secretary of State shows where things could yet head. None of the oil companies has done less in the way of developing alternative energy than Exxon. The USA has been producing technologically primitive vehicles for decades, which is why so many of their households run European or Far Eastern, and Detroit is now rust-belt. This could be set to continue.

The cities going for diesel-free in 2025 are Paris, Madrid, Athens and Mexico City. Paris would like to do it sooner. London is showing interest in joining them, and there is pressure on them to do that.

I think most buyers of new cars simply want trouble-free transport, without excessive costs, for a period up to (and often less than) five years. Few buyers are looking at keeping the vehicle for say ten years. The EV should be able to provide that handsomely, provided that battery replacement (currently a predictable £75 a month, using Renault's battery rental) and controlled depreciation (eg guaranteed trade-in) can be offered. (I remember the late 70s, when Nissan were pushing their cars, with some difficulty. Everything changed when they offered a guaranteed trade-in figure - against another new Nissan, of course - which no-one else could match. Sales and 'loyal' customers mushroomed.)

Will be fun picking up the used ones, as you say.

[NewcastleFalcon]

GS: http://www.evalbum.com/868

Yet another one from Australia Richard. I like the detail of the conversions under the main pics from that site, and getting more familiar with the anatomy and terminology of the conversions, without being too knowledgeable about them as yet but keen to learn

Looking at the "French" ones there's a couple of these "Henney Kilowatts" on the site from late 50's early 60's, which were an Electric Renault Dauphine.



Regards Neil

[NewcastleFalcon]

I'm right with you there Simon and I'm looking forward to when electric cars are old enough that we can economically get hold of them for peanuts and work out how to get a bit more life out of them as cheaply as possible....

There's always the "Scrapheap Challenge" approach a Citroen Xantia, main electric motor from a 1970 Forklift Truck, ancillary motor from a treadmill to run the hydraulics......its been done before....

http://www.evalbum.com/4499

I wonder what the second hand market is like now. A while back I think I posted up a link as an example of second hand Nissan Leafs for around £5000 off a Nissan Dealers forecourt. Those Allied Conversions of Peugeot Partners/Experts for Glasgow Council also came onto the market with problems requiring sorting, but which were solvable through the combined knowledge and expertese of a forum.

I'll have a paddle around myself, but if you come across any examples post them up. I think I'll stuff "electrique" into Leboncoin and see what comes up!

Regards Neil

[NewcastleFalcon]

First up! You could have this for 1000 euros!!



A Saxo Electrique at £1700 Euros

(Thanks Google Translate!!
Hello I sell my electric saxophone phase 2 there is a leak of coolant on a battery or a hose in front so impossible to load it ideal for handyman very good condition int and ext sold in the state to debate

Regards Neil