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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.

You will find articles organized by categories, along with recent comments, along the right hand column of the website. If you are just getting started with the idea of converting a gas car to electric be sure to check out Your First Electric Car .

Welcome and enjoy!
  -Jerry

EV iPhone Apps · 8 March 11

I was curious the other day, wondering what was available in the world of EV related apps for your iPhone, iPod, and iPad. Any design tools? Remote EV monitors or the like? Sadly, no. But let’s take a quick visit to the app store to find out what is available these days.

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Tools Update · 26 June 08

Just wanted to post a quick update about some changes to the EV Calculator. A number of readers were wondering how hard it would be to add driving cost to the computation and it turned out to be relatively easy.

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Your First Electric Car · 8 June 08

Leno in Baker Electric

As the price of gas soars so to does the number of folks visiting this web site. Perhaps you searched the web for electric car (EV) information and ended up here? Or maybe you’ve been checking in for years, the idea of a conversion tickling at the back of your brain. However you found us, welcome!

There’s a lot of information on this web site and not all of it is organized with the first time converter in mind. This article is meant to try and help organize the information you need along with providing a few pointers in getting started.

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Electric Car Safety · 27 April 08

High Voltage

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.

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Q & A · 8 April 07

As part of our Spring housecleaning I’ve started putting together an FAQ for the site. Many of the questions come straight from my email in-box (the names have been changed to protect the innocent!).

There are ten of them posted so far, more to come. If you have corrections or questions you’d like to see added be sure to drop me an email.

EVConvert FAQs

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Holiday Ramblings · 8 December 06

Jetboil Java Kit

First off this post isn’t all EV related, just some of it.

I do part time web work for the folks over at Jetboil and recently put together an online store for them and thought I’d share a nice deal they are offering for the holidays. You can pick up a Jetboil Java Kit at their online store for ninety bucks. Included is, of course, the great Jetboil PCS (personal cooking system), the lightweight French Press, a sampling of coffee, and a fuel canister. As a holiday bonus you get an extra canister of fuel, free gift wrapping with card, and free shipping anywhere in the continental USA. I think this particular deal runs until the 15th and, since they ship it with fuel (i.e. ground shipping), it’s only available in the US.

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Hi! · 13 September 06

Red Tailed Hawk

Man, sorry for such a long quiet spell.

Well, lessee, last we talked my father had passed on and I drove out to the midwest to take care of things. Well, as it turned out things weren’t so good and required a whole bunch of taking care of.

Since then I’ve been living off and on in New Hampshire and Nebraska, doing my normal full-time job remotely, managing his radio station full-time, and working on some of the other estate items. If you do the math that comes out to…oh, about zero hours free-time per day.

Of course when I’m in Nebraska that means Eve is about 2,000 miles away and not being worked on. Maybe she’ll be this winter’s project? We’ll see.

The good news out of this whole thing, or at least interesting and pertinent from this site’s perspective, is that in the middle of all of this I bought a Toyota Prius. When you have to drive 2,000 miles to get somewhere, and do it a few times, you really want to get great gas mileage. And I have been. Interstate driving, at around 70+ mph, I’ve been averaging 47 miles per gallon. Around town and short highway trips clock in around 54mpg.

I haven’t spent much time trying to optimize these, but I do have a number of observations and opinions about the Prius that I hope to share in a future article (if time permits). Bottom line though is that the Prius is probably the BEST car I’ve ever owned and I hope more car manufacturers take a cue or two from it and start building modern, smart cars like this.

Hope you are all well.

Oh, and if you are interested in buying a 100KW FM radio station in the Panhandle of Nebraska drop me a line.

-Jerry

p.s. the photo is one I took of a Red Tailed Hawk in Nebraska

Comment [32]

News · 24 June 06

Tree

Site updates are going to be light to non-existant for a while folks. My father was checked into the hospital and the prognosis is not good. I’ll be traveling and in and out of communications for a while. Update: he passed away on Saturday.

Of course y’all should keep on plugging away and helping each other as you’ve been doing in the comments. Lots of great information being shared, which makes the site/community all the better.

I’ll leave you with a few treats.

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