Did you hear about the guy in Dallas who converted his car to electric?

Question

Yeah he pulled the gas motor out and installed a electric motor and some batteries in the trunk with a charger and he plugs it in with a extension cord, he say it cost him $7 for the whole month to go back and forth to work. Wow huh, he said the conversion cost $4000.00, which is cheap if you think about this gas going to $10 per gallon by next summer. It was in the Dallas paper, heck at that savings I could get a throw down car for running around town and save the gas hog for trips on the highway.

Answer 1

There are news stories and videos of EV conversions like this all over the internet.  And no, they DO NOT USE GOLF CART MOTORS.  Most motors come from the electric fork lift industry.  A very popular motor is the Advanced DC 9 inch.  It puts out 28 horse power continuous and something like 100 peak.  With this motor in your car you are practically guaranteed to hit 50 to 70 MPH.

If you want to see how it's done check out http://www.kiwiev.com   He has about 25 to 30 videos of every step he took to convert a car to electric drive.  Some things are a little different because he is in another country.  But he did it without any particularly fancy tools in his 1 car garage.  He took videos of every step from towing the victim home to showing it off at local events, he even showed up on national TV.

I'm a member of the local electric vehicle association ( http://www.eaaev.org ) and there are dozens of electric conversions around here, the most notable is http://voltrunner.com

Please don't knock electric cars until you've tried one.  It's easy to sit there and say they are just glorified golf carts when most of them could be driving right beside you on the freeway and you wouldn't even know it.  Don't forget the oil companies and car makers don't want you to know that there is an alternative to gas and will say anything to discredit EV's.  EV's reduce pollution by 99%, are cheaper to operate and will work for over 80% of the US population.

Answer 2

I have real doubts that he took a real automobile, like a Toyota, Chevy, Honda, etc. and installed an electric motor powerful enough to drive it at highway speeds and accelerate reasonably quickly, and batteries to give it any sort of real range, for just $4,000.

I'm not saying it can't be done.  Just not at that price.

I've read of several people taking their Toyota Priuses, adding significantly more batteries, and a adapting them so they could plug them in and charge the batteries, so the drivers could go anywhere from 10 to 40 miles on mostly batteries, except when accelerating.  Of course the price tag for doing so was usually in the $30,000 range, in addition to the price of the car.

Answer 3

hi ... what he did was take the electric motor out of a golf cart... and added extra batteries in the trunk of the car....

Basically find a golf cart....   strip it down then put the body of a geo or similar small car n it and away you go......