Welcome to the Electric Car Weblog. In addition to links, news, and tips about electric cars and other forms of alternative transportation we are publishing an on-line diary of our current EV project. Started in August 2005 the chronicle follows the conversion of a gas powered Ford Probe into an Electric Car.
Click the red car at the top of the page to start at the beginning of the conversion. Also, you will find articles organized by categories, along with recent comments, along the right hand column of the website.
Welcome and enjoy!
-Jerry
Click the red car at the top of the page to start at the beginning of the conversion. Also, you will find articles organized by categories, along with recent comments, along the right hand column of the website.
Welcome and enjoy!
-Jerry
- Ten contenders for the automotive X-prize to create the first mass-produced 100mpg car.
- Audi may have electric cars, oh, in 5 or 10 years and Nissan has signed a 10-year electric car agreement with Israel…or not, but they all seem to be working on something.
- Four ways to re-invent your wheels.
- Home tinkerer develops an engine to run on used tranny fluid.
- And Tesla opened their first electric car dealership in California. Swing on by if you got an extra $100k burning a hole in your pocket. Some nice pictures, love the battery pack: 6,800 lithium cells!
John Williams' Daihatsu Electric Car · 05/04/08
Whenever possible we try to showcase EV conversions from our readers. It is a great way to learn from the work of others and get a broader perspective of the many ways an old car can be converted to electric. It also provides a forum (i.e. via the comments) for everyone to ask questions and learn from the person doing the conversion.
John has been helpfully posting in our comment forums for some time now and it only just struck me that, “Hey, I should make a post for John’s car!”
Sorry to be so slow, John.
Electric Car Safety · 04/27/08
With all of the research, cost, and labor that you put into the design and construction of your EV it can be hard to keep safety in mind. Not only being safe while constructing the EV, but also the bigger safety issues of day to day driving, charging, and even of showing the “guts” of your new EV to the public.
In this article I try to cover some of the safety issues involved in designing and constructing your electric car conversion.
- 30 Electric car companies ready to take over. Or rather, I suspect based on the levels of email I get these days, at least generate a lot more interest, sell a few, and lead others to their own conversions.
- It looks like the Think City electric car is getting more funding and moving closer to coming to the states, priced under $25k. Any of our European readers seen or tried these?
- It’s not fully an electric, but mighty close and it’s also a product out of A123 systems: the Hymotion L5 plug-in kit for Toyota Prius. They claim 100 mpg for 30-40 miles of range, details on their website. If you want more information on PHEV’s check out the EAA wiki.
- Where might you get electricity to power all of these? How about a 33MW Solar Power plant?
- Speaking of which, check out Brent’s Solar 8 seat Bike.
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- Popular Mechanics takes the Aptera futuristic electric car for a test drive. They also take you into the factory for an inside look at the vehicle components.
- Got some spare reading time this weekend? Check out Renewable Energy and Energy Conservation Tax Act of 2008. A somewhat interesting section for us can be found in Section 201 where they propose some rather nice tax credits for electric cars, uh, as long as they also have a gas engine inside (i.e. plug-in hybrid). For those with a regular EV? You don’t qualify. Here’s a list of Senators on the committee.
- Did that simply wet your appetite for government documents? Here’s another analyzing the feasibility of PHEVs and the power grid.
- After all of that is said and done Congress doesn’t totally ignore EVs. No, they think they are too quiet and want to create a noise standard.
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- Larry Maysilles’ homemade electric car.
- GM is starting to test the lithium batteries they hope to use in the Chevy Volt.
- Audi pondering the all-electric car (not to be confused with an electric car).
- Hype Machine: Searching for ZAP’s Fleet of No-Show Green Cars.
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- Congrats to Gavin on his first EV drive! Youtube version here, some photos over at the DIYEV Forum, and of course straight from the EV’ers mouth at his website.
- And speaking of the DIY EV forum, I’ve been meaning to share a few links to the EV Blog, Forum, and Wiki.
- James passes along a link to an article on The Oil Drum by our Italian EV friends Ugo Bardi and Pietro Cambi.
- Not really a new link or anything, but while watching the baby the other day I was reading the Wikipedia entry on Motor controllers and ran across this line regarding Controls for AC Induction Motors: “Recent developments in drive electronics have allowed efficient and convenient speed control of these motors, where this has not traditionally been the case. The newest advancements allow for torque generation down to zero speed. This allows the polyphase AC induction motor to compete in areas where DC motors have long dominated, and present an advantage in robustness of design, cost, and reduced maintenance.”
- Helping to balance the electrical grid…with your EV.
- Finally a bit of humor to round off the links. Check out Top Gear’s show on the Peel P50. While watching it I kept thinking “…a handful of lithiums, a pancake wheel hub motor.”.
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- Ran across this article on Ultra-Capacitors over at IEEE Spectrum the other day. I hadn’t realized how big of a market there already is for the ultra-caps: “Hundreds of thousands of ultracapacitors are manufactured each year, for applications that require rapid recharging, high power output, and repetitive cycling. In 2005, the ultracapacitor market was between US $272 million and $400 million..”
- Winner of the space-age-design award for EVs (or prototype EVs) has got to go to the Aptera. Who knows if this will ever be found cruising your local streets but it is an interesting design: looks like an airplane someone plucked the wings off of. More on their website.
- Putting some LEDs into your EV? Here’s a handy LED Calculator to help you get the right series resistor. There’s even a series/parallel version.
- A friend passed along this CNN article, Gas Guzzlers get new lives featuring Neil Young having his Lincoln Continental turned into a hybrid (bio-diesel no less). Intrigued I searched the web for the guy doing the work and found this Fast Company article along with another article trying to follow up on his claims.
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