Comment on What would it take to change an Internal Combustion Engine Car to an EV?
Tarastie@lemmy.world 8 months ago
A miracle, an engineering degree, and a lot of money?
You’d be much better off looking into the hundreds (thousands?) of interesting tweaks? that have been done to vehicles as experiments to make them more efficient.
Adding all the latest innovation to an engine. Adding a full rear axel with an electric motor and a simple “push while driving” setup. Swapping the motor for a much smaller motor and storing unused horsepower with compressed air and welding tanks. A small turbine motor powering electric drive like a train…
There’s to many ways to make a vehicle massively efficient to even begin going over it here.
Adding a full rear axel with an electric motor and a simple “push while driving” setup.
This is probably the easiest way to turn an ICE into a plug-in hybrid. In addition to using much less petrol, it adds quite a bit of power for merging onto motorways.
A miracle, an engineering degree, and a lot of money?
I think that depends on what you’re hoping to achieve with the conversion
Probably true if you’re looking for something that is totally equivalent to a modern car with all the bells and whistles, with hundreds of miles of range, that will keep up with traffic going 70mph down the interstate, etc.
But if you’re just looking for an around town kind of vehicle to get groceries and such, and are maybe willing to forego some things like power steering and air conditioning, you can potentially do it fairly cheap. A junky car off of craigslist (doesn’t necessarily need to run, after all you’re not gonna need the engine anyway,) an old electric forklift motor, and a few hundred bucks in various electronics, batteries, hardware, etc. and with enough free time, the right tools, and some know-how, you can make it work. I’ve seen people online who have done it for under $2k, often including the donor car.
An engineering degree would certainly be helpful, but it’s not exactly untrodden ground at this point, if you’re willing to hit the books a bit and figure things out as you go there are a lot of resources out there to help you.
But I don't want efficient, I want that sweet sweet torque
blazera@kbin.social 8 months ago
I cant imagine compressed air moving a car even a single mile
Tarastie@lemmy.world 8 months ago
You’d better learn to imagine better.
There’s an entire documentary on an 18 horsepower compressed air car that does 0-60 in under 4 seconds.