Sähköautot - Nyt!

Hi.

Thanks for posting.

The eCars - Now! project is aiming for a range of 150 km (93,2 miles), that needs a large battery pack. The battery type to be used is LiFePO to keep the battery pack weight down, these are more expensive than lead batteries.

The major parts are
- Toyota Corolla as a donor car
- Batteries from Thunder Sky
- Motor and controller by Azure Dynamics: AC24LS, AT1200 and DMOC445
- Battery management by Lithium Balance, Denmark (that seems to have changed since last month)

In Finland the wintertime means the car must have a good heating system, that means some extra steps in conversion and parts, also some percentage of the battery pack energy goes to heating. I heard that there is some kind of heat pump system being worked on but that was a small comment in the Finnish forum if I remember correctly so I don't have more information about that.

The donor car, Toyota Corolla around year 2002-2005 is also pretty pricey like all cars in Finland. According to a Finnish web site www.autotalli.com a brand new Corolla goes from EUR 19952 to EUR 25950 ( google converts those numbers to USD 28865 - USD 37542 ).

The donor car price is still open as there has been talks about importing the donor cars to Finland from other European countries. Couple of guys are working on getting the first donor right now so we'll hear more about that in upcoming days and weeks.

I hope you can now compare the kits. How much batteries and electronics is included in the 3k conversion kit? Could you post some info here?

I have had some thoughts about getting a year 2000 Volkswagen Golf for conversion when the Corolla proto has been done and eCorolla production has been started. The used Golfs are starting from around EUR 4000 ( USD 5787 ) in Finnish used car sites. That will push the total conversion price down a little bit but you have to switch the 8 years old chassis to a new one couple of years earlier than a 3-5 years old one.

I hope this helps and I wish you all the best with your conversion project!

Best regards,
Murska

Edit: fixed some typos — M

Thuder-Sky=pseudonym Thunder-Sky.You have to be carefully taught.Use GOOGLE javascript:;http://ecomodder.com/blog/cheap-diy-electric-car/

"TSkyOvercharge"?

I see that picture as a reminder to get a good charger and/or battery management system. If you mistreat the batteries (like overcharge them) they will be ruined much faster.

Br, Murska

Pedro,

This is an open source project where the intention is to create a conversion kit from COTS (Common-Off-The-Shelf) parts. There are car specific and non-car specific parts on the kit. Non-specific are motor+battery+battery controller+computer (ecu+gui). Car specific are motor chassis, battery chassis, transmission box and drive shaft. Our kit uses CAN. We do not sell kits, we define the kit that anyone can use and we have selected one car model, e.g. Toyota Corolla for this. We have not created other kits for other cars and I doubt that will happen. At least not with the current conversion.

That is because selection, mounting, measuring and programming takes time and since all of us are working on our free time, there are no guaranteed resources to make other kits. Our current car is sponsored and if someone would like us to make different kits to other cars or use different parts, we would need a sponsor for it and that sponsor would need to provide the whole kit including car to us in Finland, because no-one of us or our sponsor wants to rip off parts from eCorolla now that it is going to be finished in a couple of weeks.

Replacing battery, motor, computers etc. is possible. All our interfaces are open and all mounting kits are open too with CAD drawings and we have a conversion guide in English on the works too - initial version is available on our site. And as long as you comply with interfaces and specs you can easily try other options, but you need to do that by your own as mentioned before.

But I must say that I have been on this project since it started and conversion is imho much simpler than I originally thought. Take look at the the kit and think about it.