Convert To Electric

Electric Car Conversion Kit Page 1 of 14
Build An Electric Car - Electric Car Conversion

Did you know that you can convert your gas guzzling car into an energy-
efficient electric car? You NO LONGER have to pay outrageous gas prices. Here
are some advantages of electric cars...
Cut your gas bill to practically nothing;

Enjoy a quieter engine and a smoother ride;
Better performance for your vehicle;
Massively reduced greenhouse emissions;
IRS refunds for driving a more environmentally friendly vehicle
... And the good news is, you can convert your car into an electric vehicle very
easily and inexpensively. The guide we recommend is Gas 2 Electric, because it
delivers a ton of value and is also very cheap. Click the button below to pick up
the guide right now -- you'll be glad you did:
Electric Car Conversion Kit

How Electric Cars Work
Electric cars are something that show up in the news all the time. There are several reasons for the continuing interest in these
vehicles:
Electric cars create less pollution than gasoline-powered cars, so they are an environmentally friendly alternative to gasoline-
powered vehicles (especially in cities).
Any news story about hybrid cars usually talks about electric cars as well.
Vehicles powered by fuel cells are electric cars, and fuel cells are getting a lot of attention right now in the news.
An electric car is a car powered by an electric motor rather than a gasoline engine.
From the outside, you would probably have no idea that a car is electric. In most cases, electric cars are created by converting a
gasoline-powered car, and in that case it is impossible to tell. When you drive an electric car, often the only thing that clues you in to
its true nature is the fact that it is nearly silent.
Under the hood, there are a lot of differences between gasoline and electric cars:
The gasoline engine is replaced by an electric motor.

The electric motor gets its power from a controller.
The controller gets its power from an array of rechargeable batteries.
A gasoline engine, with its fuel lines, exhaust pipes, coolant hoses and intake manifold, tends to look like a plumbing project. An
electric car is definitely a wiring project.
In order to get a feeling for how electric cars work in general, let's start by looking at a typical electric car to see how it comes
together.
The EV Challenge
The EV Challenge (www.evchallenge.org) is an innovative
educational program for middle and high school students
that centers around building electric-powered cars:
Middle school students build and compete model

solar-powered cars.
High school students convert full-sized gasoline-
powered vehicles into electric vehicles. It's a
complete conversion project, as described in the
previous section of this article.
http://heserver/index.html 06-10-2008
Students learn about electric technology throughout the

year and then come together for a two-day finale. In
addition to building the electric vehicle, high school
students compete in autocross (speed and agility) and
range events, vehicle design, oral presentations,
troubleshooting, Web site design, and community
involvement.
The EV Challenge gets a majority of its funding from
corporate sponsors and government organizations,
including Advanced Energy Corporation, CP&L/Progress
Energy, Duke Power, Dominion Virginia Power, the NC
Energy Office, the NC Department of Environment and
Natural Resources, and the EPA.
Jon Mauney (whose car is featured at the beginning of
this article) is on the steering committee for EV Challenge.
According to Jon, CP&L started the EV Challenge program
in North Carolina. The program then spread to South
Carolina, Florida, Virginia, West Virginia, and Georgia, and
is now spreading nationwide. Thousands of students have
participated in the EV Challenge.
If you or your school would like more information on the
EV Challenge program, please see www.evchallenge.org.
An Electric Car Example

The electric car that we will use for this discussion is shown here:
A typical electric car, this one has some

particularly snazzy decals. This vehicle is owned
by Jon Mauney.
See more pictures of electric cars.
This electric vehicle began its life as a normal, gasoline-powered 1994 Geo Prism. Here are the modifications that turned it into an
electric car:
The gasoline engine, along with the muffler, catalytic converter, tailpipe and gas tank, were all removed.
The clutch assembly was removed. The existing manual transmission was left in place, and it was pinned in second gear.
A new AC electric motor was bolted to the transmission with an adapter plate.
An electric controller was added to control the AC motor.
The 50-kW controller takes in 300 volts DC and

produces
240 volts AC, three-phase. The box that says

"U.S. Electricar" is the controller.
A battery tray was installed in the floor of the car.

Fifty 12-volt lead-acid batteries were placed in the battery tray (two sets of 25 to create 300 volts DC).
Electric motors were added to power things that used to get their power from the engine: the water pump, power steering
pump, air conditioner.
A vacuum pump was added for the power brakes (which used engine vacuum when the car had an engine).
The vacuum pump is left of center.
The shifter for the manual transmission was replaced with a switch, disguised as an automatic transmission shifter, to control
forward and reverse.
An automatic transmission shifter is used to

select forward
and reverse. It contains a small switch, which
sends a signal to the controller.
A small electric water heater was added to provide heat.
The water heater
A charger was added so that the batteries could be recharged. This particular car actually has two charging systems -- one from
a normal 120-volt or 240-volt wall outlet, and the other from a magna-charge inductive charging paddle.
The 120/240-volt charging system
The Magna-Charge inductive paddle charging

system
The gas gauge was replaced with a volt meter.
The "gas gauge" in an electric car is either a

simple volt meter or a more sophisticated
computer that tracks the flow of amps to and
from the battery pack.
Everything else about the car is stock. When you get in to drive the car, you put the key in the ignition and turn it to the "on" position
to turn the car on. You shift into "Drive" with the shifter, push on the accelerator pedal and go. It performs like a normal gasoline car.
Here are some interesting statistics:
The range of this car is about 50 miles (80 km).

The 0-to-60 mph time is about 15 seconds.
It takes about 12 kilowatt-hours of electricity to charge the car after a 50-mile trip.
The batteries weigh about 1,100 pounds (500 kg).
The batteries last three to four years.
To compare the cost per mile of gasoline cars to this electric car, here's an example. Electricity in North Carolina is about 8 cents per
kilowatt-hour right now (4 cents if you use time-of-use billing and recharge at night). That means that for a full recharge, it costs $1
(or 50 cents with time-of-use billing). The cost per mile is therefore 2 cents per mile, or 1 cent with time-of-use. If gasoline costs
$1.20 per gallon and a car gets 30 miles to the gallon, then the cost per mile is 4 cents per mile for gasoline.
Clearly, the "fuel" for electric vehicles costs a lot less per mile than it does for gasoline vehicles. And for many, the 50-mile range is
not a limitation -- the average person living in a city or suburb seldom drives more than 30 or 40 miles per day.
To be completely fair, however, we should also include the cost of battery replacement. Batteries are the weak link in electric cars at
the moment. Battery replacement for this car runs about $2,000. The batteries will last 20,000 miles or so, for about 10 cents per
mile. You can see why there is so much excitement around fuel cells right now -- fuel cells solve the battery problem (more details on
fuel cells later in the article).
Inside An Electric Car
The heart of an electric car is the combination of:
The electric motor

The motor's controller
The batteries
A simple DC controller connected to the batteries

and the DC motor. If the driver floors the
accelerator pedal, the controller delivers the full
96 volts from the batteries to the motor. If the
driver take his/her foot off the accelerator, the

controller delivers zero volts to the motor. For
any setting in between, the controller "chops"
the 96 volts thousands of times per second to
create an average voltage somewhere between 0
and 96 volts.
The controller takes power from the batteries and delivers it to the motor. The accelerator pedal hooks to a pair of potentiometers
(variable resistors), and these potentiometers provide the signal that tells the controller how much power it is supposed to deliver.
The controller can deliver zero power (when the car is stopped), full power (when the driver floors the accelerator pedal), or any
power level in between.
The controller normally dominates the scene when you open the hood, as you can see here:
The 300-volt, 50-kilowatt controller for this

electric car is the box marked "U.S. Electricar."
In this car, the controller takes in 300 volts DC from the battery pack. It converts it into a maximum of 240 volts AC, three-phase, to
send to the motor. It does this using very large transistors that rapidly turn the batteries' voltage on and off to create a sine wave.
When you push on the gas pedal, a cable from the pedal connects to these two potentiometers:
The potentiometers hook to the gas pedal and

send a signal to the controller.
The signal from the potentiometers tells the controller how much power to deliver to the electric car's motor. There are two
potentiometers for safety's sake. The controller reads both potentiometers and makes sure that their signals are equal. If they are
not, then the controller does not operate. This arrangement guards against a situation where a potentiometer fails in the full-on
position.
Heavy cables (on the left) connect the battery

pack to the controller. In the middle is a very
large on/off switch. The bundle of small wires on
the right carries signals from thermometers
located between the batteries, as well as power
for fans that keep the batteries cool and
ventilated.
The heavy wires entering and leaving the

controller
The controller's job in a DC electric car is easy to understand. Let's assume that the battery pack contains 12 12-volt batteries, wired
in series to create 144 volts. The controller takes in 144 volts DC, and delivers it to the motor in a controlled way.
The very simplest DC controller would be a big on/off switch wired to the accelerator pedal. When you push the pedal, it would turn
the switch on, and when you take your foot off the pedal, it would turn it off. As the driver, you would have to push and release the
accelerator to pulse the motor on and off to maintain a given speed.
Obviously, that sort of on/off approach would work but it would be a pain to drive, so the controller does the pulsing for you. The
controller reads the setting of the accelerator pedal from the potentiometers and regulates the power accordingly. Let's say that you
have the accelerator pushed halfway down. The controller reads that setting from the potentiometer and rapidly switches the power
to the motor on and off so that it is on half the time and off half the time. If you have the accelerator pedal 25 percent of the way
down, the controller pulses the power so it is on 25 percent of the time and off 75 percent of the time.
Most controllers pulse the power more than 15,000 times per second, in order to keep the pulsation outside the range of human
hearing. The pulsed current causes the motor housing to vibrate at that frequency, so by pulsing at more than 15,000 cycles per
second, the controller and motor are silent to human ears.
An AC controller hooks to an AC motor. Using six

sets of power transistors, the controller takes in
300 volts DC and produces 240 volts AC, 3-phase.
See How the Power Grid Works for a discussion
of 3-phase power. The controller additionally
provides a charging system for the batteries, and
a DC-to-DC converter to recharge the 12-volt
accessory battery.
In an AC controller, the job is a little more complicated, but it is the same idea. The controller creates three pseudo-sine waves. It
does this by taking the DC voltage from the batteries and pulsing it on and off. In an AC controller, there is the additional need to
reverse the polarity of the voltage 60 times a second. Therefore, you actually need six sets of transistors in an AC controller, while
you need only one set in a DC controller. In the AC controller, for each phase you need one set of transistors to pulse the voltage and
another set to reverse the polarity. You replicate that three times for the three phases -- six total sets of transistors.
Most DC controllers used in electric cars come from the electric forklift industry. The Hughes AC controller seen in the photo above is
the same sort of AC controller used in the GM/Saturn EV-1 electric vehicle. It can deliver a maximum of 50,000 watts to the motor.
Electric-car Motors and Batteries
Electric cars can use AC or DC motors:
If the motor is a DC motor, then it may run on anything from 96 to 192 volts. Many of the DC motors used in electric cars
come from the electric forklift industry.
If it is an AC motor, then it probably is a three-phase AC motor running at 240 volts AC with a 300 volt battery pack.
DC installations tend to be simpler and less expensive. A typical motor will be in the 20,000-watt to 30,000-watt range. A typical
controller will be in the 40,000-watt to 60,000-watt range (for example, a 96-volt controller will deliver a maximum of 400 or 600
amps). DC motors have the nice feature that you can overdrive them (up to a factor of 10-to-1) for short periods of time. That is, a
20,000-watt motor will accept 100,000 watts for a short period of time and deliver 5 times its rated horsepower. This is great for
short bursts of acceleration. The only limitation is heat build-up in the motor. Too much overdriving and the motor heats up to the
point where it self-destructs.
AC installations allow the use of almost any industrial three-phase AC motor, and that can make finding a motor with a specific size,
shape or power rating easier. AC motors and controllers often have a regen feature. During braking, the motor turns into a generator
and delivers power back to the batteries.
Right now, the weak link in any electric car is the batteries. There are at least six significant problems with current lead-acid battery
technology:
They are heavy (a typical lead-acid battery pack weighs 1,000 pounds or more).
They are bulky (the car we are examining here has 50 lead-acid batteries, each measuring roughly 6" x 8" by 6").
They have a limited capacity (a typical lead-acid battery pack might hold 12 to 15 kilowatt-hours of electricity, giving a car a
range of only 50 miles or so).
They are slow to charge (typical recharge times for a lead-acid pack range between four to 10 hours for full charge, depending
on the battery technology and the charger).
They have a short life (three to four years, perhaps 200 full charge/discharge cycles).
They are expensive (perhaps $2,000 for the battery pack shown in the sample car).
In the next section we'll look at more problems with battery technology.


Battery Problems
You can replace lead-acid batteries with NiMH batteries. The range of the car will double and the batteries will last 10 years
(thousands of charge/discharge cycles), but the cost of the batteries today is 10 to 15 times greater than lead-acid. In other words,
an NiMH battery pack will cost $20,000 to $30,000 (today) instead of $2,000. Prices for advanced batteries fall as they become
mainstream, so over the next several years it is likely that NiMH and lithium-ion battery packs will become competitive with lead-acid
battery prices. Electric cars will have significantly better range at that point.
When you look at the problems associated with batteries, you gain a different perspective on gasoline. Two gallons of gasoline, which
weighs 15 pounds, costs $3.00 and takes 30 seconds to pour into the tank, is equivalent to 1,000 pounds of lead-acid batteries that
cost $2,000 and take four hours to recharge.
The problems with battery technology explain why there is so much excitement around fuel cells today. Compared to batteries, fuel
cells will be smaller, much lighter and instantly rechargeable. When powered by pure hydrogen, fuel cells have none of the
environmental problems associated with gasoline. It is very likely that the car of the future will be an electric car that gets its
electricity from a fuel cell. There is still a lot of research and development that will have to occur, however, before inexpensive,
reliable fuel cells can power automobiles.
Just about any electric car has one other battery on board. This is the normal 12-volt lead-acid battery that every car has. The 12-volt
battery provides power for accessories -- things like headlights, radios, fans, computers, air bags, wipers, power windows and
instruments inside the car. Since all of these devices are readily available and standardized at 12 volts, it makes sense from an
economic standpoint for an electric car to use them.
Therefore, an electric car has a normal 12-volt lead-acid battery to power all of the accessories. To keep the battery charged, an
electric car needs a DC-to-DC converter. This converter takes in the DC power from the main battery array (at, for example, 300
volts DC) and converts it down to 12 volts to recharge the accessory battery. When the car is on, the accessories get their power
from the DC-to-DC converter. When the car is off, they get their power from the 12-volt battery as in any gasoline-powered vehicle.
The DC-to-DC converter is normally a separate box under the hood, but sometimes this box is built into the controller.
Of course, any car that uses batteries needs a way to charge them.
Charging An Electric Car

Any electric car that uses batteries needs a charging system to recharge the batteries. The charging system has two goals:
To pump electricity into the batteries as quickly as the batteries will allow
To monitor the batteries and avoid damaging them during the charging process
Charging Current
When lead-acid batteries are at a low state of charge, nearly all the charging current is absorbed by the chemical reaction. Once the
state of charge reaches a certain point, at about 80 percent of capacity, more and more energy goes into heat and electrolysis of the
water. The resulting bubbling of electrolyte is informally called "boiling." For the charging system to minimize the boiling, the charging
current must cut back for the last 20 percent of the charging process.
The most sophisticated charging systems monitor battery voltage, current flow and battery temperature to minimize charging time.
The charger sends as much current as it can without raising battery temperature too much. Less sophisticated chargers might
monitor voltage or amperage only and make certain assumptions about average battery characteristics. A charger like this might
apply maximum current to the batteries up through 80 percent of their capacity, and then cut the current back to some preset level
for the final 20 percent to avoid overheating the batteries.
Jon Mauney's electric car actually has two different charging systems. One system accepts 120-volt or 240-volt power from a normal
electrical outlet. The other is the Magna-Charge inductive charging system popularized by the GM/Saturn EV-1 vehicle. Let's look at
each of these systems separately.
The normal household charging system has the advantage of convenience -- anywhere you can find an outlet, you can recharge. The
disadvantage is charging time.
A normal household 120-volt outlet typically has a 15-amp circuit breaker, meaning that the maximum amount of energy that the car
can consume is approximately 1,500 watts, or 1.5 kilowatt-hours per hour. Since the battery pack in Jon's car normally needs 12 to
15 kilowatt-hours for a full recharge, it can take 10 to 12 hours to fully charge the vehicle using this technique.
By using a 240-volt circuit (such as the outlet for an electric dryer), the car might be able to receive 240 volts at 30 amps, or 6.6
kilowatt-hours per hour. This arrangement allows significantly faster charging, and can fully recharge the battery pack in four to five
hours.
In Jon's car, the gas filler spout has been removed and replaced by a charging plug. Simply plugging into the wall with a heavy-duty
extension cord starts the charging process.
Opening the gas filler door reveals the charging plug.
Close-up of the plug
Plug the car in anywhere to recharge.

In this car, the charger is built into the controller. In most home-brew cars, the charger is a separate box located under the hood, or
could even be a free-standing unit that is separate from the car.
In the next section we'll look at the Magna-Charge system.
The Magna-Charge System

The Magna-Charge system consists of two parts:
A charging station mounted to the wall of the house
A charging system in the trunk of the car
The charging station is hard-wired to a 240-volt 40-amp circuit through the house's circuit panel.
The charging system sends electricity to the car using this inductive paddle:
The paddle fits into a slot hidden behind the license plate of the car.
The paddle acts as one half of a transformer. The other half is inside the car, positioned around the slot behind the license plate.
When you insert the paddle, it forms a complete transformer with the slot, and power transfers to the car.
One advantage of the inductive system is that there are no exposed electrical contacts. You can touch the paddle or drop the paddle
into a puddle of water and there is no hazard. The other advantage is the ability to pump a significant amount of current into the car
very quickly because the charging station is hard-wired to a dedicated 240-volt circuit.
The competing high-power charge connector is generally referred to as the "Avcon plug" and it is used by Ford and others. It
features copper-to-copper contacts instead of the inductive paddle, and has an elaborate mechanical interconnect that keeps the
contacts covered until the connector is mated with the receptacle on the vehicle. Pairing this connector with GFCI protection makes it
safe in any kind of weather. Jon Mauney points out the following:
An important feature of the charging process is "equalization." An EV has a string of batteries (somewhere between 10 and 25
modules, each containing three to six cells). The batteries are closely matched, but they are not identical. Therefore they have slight
differences in capacity and internal resistance. All batteries in a string necessarily put out the same current (laws of electricity), but
the weaker batteries have to "work harder" to produce the current, so they're at a slightly lower state of charge at the end of the
drive. Therefore, the weaker batteries need more recharge to get back to full charge.
Since the batteries are in series, they also get exactly the same amount of recharge, leaving the weak battery even weaker
(relatively) than it was before. Over time, this results in one battery going bad long before the rest of the pack. The weakest-link
effect means that this battery determines the range of the vehicle, and the usability of the car drops off.
The common solution to the problem is "equalization charge." You gently overcharge the batteries to make sure that the weakest
cells are brought up to full charge. The trick is to keep the batteries equalized without damaging the strongest batteries with
overcharging. There are more complex solutions that scan the batteries, measure individual voltages, and send extra charging current
through the weakest module.
In the next section, we'll walk through a conversion step by step.
Converting Your Car Into An Electric Vehicle

A majority of the electric cars on the road today are "home brew" conversion vehicles. People with an interest in electric cars convert
existing gasoline-powered cars to electric in their backyards and garages. There are many Web sites that talk about the phenomenon
and show you how to do it, where to get parts, etc.
A typical conversion uses a DC controller and a DC motor. The person doing the conversion decides what voltage the system will
run at -- typically anything between 96 volts and 192 volts. The voltage decision controls how many batteries the car will need, and
what sort of motor and controller the car will use. The most common motors and controllers used in home conversions come from the
electric forklift industry.
Usually, the person doing the conversion has a "donor vehicle" that will act as the platform for the conversion. Almost always, the
donor vehicle is a normal gasoline-powered car that gets converted to electric. Most donor vehicles have a manual transmission.
The person doing the conversion has a lot of choices when it comes to battery technology. The vast majority of home conversions use
lead-acid batteries, and there are several different options:
Marine deep-cycle lead-acid batteries (These are available everywhere, including Wal-mart.)
Golf-cart batteries
High-performance sealed batteries
The batteries can have a flooded, gelled or AGM (absorbed glass mat) electrolyte. Flooded batteries tend to have the lowest cost but
also the lowest peak power.
Once the decisions about the motor, controller and batteries are made, the conversion can start. Here are the steps:
Remove the engine, gas tank, exhaust system, clutch and perhaps the radiator from the donor vehicle. Some controllers have
water-cooled transistors, while some are air-cooled.
Attach an adapter plate to the transmission and mount the motor. The motor normally requires custom mounting brackets.
Usually, the electric motor needs a reduction gear for maximum efficiency. The easiest way to create the gear reduction is to pin
the existing manual transmission in first or second gear. It would save weight to create a custom reduction gear, but normally it
is too expensive.
Mount the controller.
Find space for, and build brackets to safely hold, all the batteries. Install the batteries. Sealed batteries have the advantage that
they can be turned on their sides and fitted into all sorts of nooks and crannies.
Wire the batteries and motor to the controller with #00 gauge welding cable.
If the car has power steering, wire up and mount an electric motor for the power steering pump.
If the car has air conditioning, wire up and mount an electric motor for the A/C compressor.
Install a small electric water heater for heat and plumb it into the existing heater core, or use a small ceramic electric space
heater.
If the car has power brakes, install a vacuum pump to operate the brake booster.
Install a charging system.
Install a DC-to-DC converter to power the accessory battery.
Install some sort of volt meter to be able to detect state of charge in the battery pack. This volt meter replaces the gas gauge.
Install potentiometers, hook them to the accelerator pedal and connect to the controller.
Most home-brew electric cars using DC motors use the reverse gear built into the manual transmission. AC motors with
advanced controllers simply run the motor in reverse and need a simple switch that sends a reverse signal to the controller.
Depending on the conversion, you may need to install some sort of reverse switch and wire to the controller.
Install a large relay (also known as a contactor) that can connect and disconnect the car's battery pack to and from the
controller. This relay is how you turn the car "on" when you want to drive it. You need a relay that can carry hundreds of amps
and that can break 96 to 300 volts DC without holding an arc.
Rewire the ignition switch so that it can turn on all the new equipment, including the contactor.
Once everything is installed and tested, the new electric car is ready to go!



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Electric Car Conversion Kit Page 1 of 14

Build An Electric Car - Electric Car Conversion

Cut your gas bill to practically nothing;

Electric Car Conversion Kit

The gasoline engine is replaced by an electric motor.

Middle school students build and compete model

Students learn about electric technology throughout the

An Electric Car Example

A typical electric car, this one has some

The 50-kW controller takes in 300 volts DC and

240 volts AC, three-phase. The box that says

A battery tray was installed in the floor of the car.

The vacuum pump is left of center.

An automatic transmission shifter is used to

A small electric water heater was added to provide heat.

The water heater

The 120/240-volt charging system

The Magna-Charge inductive paddle charging

The gas gauge was replaced with a volt meter.

The "gas gauge" in an electric car is either a

The range of this car is about 50 miles (80 km).

The electric motor

A simple DC controller connected to the batteries

driver take his/her foot off the accelerator, the

The 300-volt, 50-kilowatt controller for this

The potentiometers hook to the gas pedal and

Heavy cables (on the left) connect the battery

The heavy wires entering and leaving the

An AC controller hooks to an AC motor. Using six

Build An Electric Car - Electric Car Conversion

Cut your gas bill to practically nothing;

Charging An Electric Car

Opening the gas filler door reveals the charging plug.

Close-up of the plug

Plug the car in anywhere to recharge.

The Magna-Charge System

A charging station mounted to the wall of the house

A charging system in the trunk of the car

Converting Your Car Into An Electric Vehicle

Build An Electric Car - Electric Car Conversion

Cut your gas bill to practically nothing;

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