Swapping an engine is relatively easy if you know what you’re doing… If these kits can connect the electric motor to the existing drive train it wouldn’t be too bad. Messing around with batteries big enough for an electric vehicle can be really dangerous though.
Comment on New cars are great...
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 8 months agoI dont know the details, but Ive heard of companies that do this, or kits that can be used for it, existing, though I can only imagine that changing a car that one’s business has not manufactured and was never designed for such a conversion must take a lot of manual work, which would be expensive before even considering things like the cost of batteries.
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 8 months ago
IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
Power train conversion is reasonably simple. Just throw combustion engine and transmission box away, make brackets for electric motors and attach them directly to the wheels (with axles if necessary). Conversion of controls is (I assume) is also somewhat simple since existing brake system and power steering is quite straightforward to run with electric motors since you just need something which can run a belt drive and gas pedal is most likely already electric. For all the electronics you have plenty of space in where the engine used to be.
But. And there’s a pretty big but. Batteries are pretty big and pretty heavy. On any given combustion engine car there’s just no room for them (at least if you’re after a conversion with similar range/power than a readily built electric car). And even if you cut the floor panel off and modify it to accomodate battery pack (or whatever the route you choose might be) it’ll heavily affect weight distribution, frame stability and many other things, suspension included. Model S battery is apparently 540kg, so if you’ll do a conversion to your corolla you might save around 150kg of weight by removing old engine+transmission but you’d still have additional 300kg of mass to deal with.
For a van which is designed to haul heavy loads from the start it might be pretty simple to just raise floor of the cargo space a bit but for a common sedan that’s a whole another thing.
GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk 8 months ago
I looked into this for my car. The conversion has a 50 mile range, essentially replaces the engine with an electric motor, locks the car in 3rd gear, and replaces the fuel tank with batteries.
It cost about £3500, which was a bit much for me considering the car only cost £3k, and I could just sell my car to buy a 100mile+ leaf for the same outlay.
Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 8 months ago
BEVs built from the ground up are much better at being BEVs.
IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
In our local craigslist for cars website someone has been selling a -84(or so) Nissan Sunny for ages with electric conversion. The seller did just that, took combustion engine out, attached a electric motor into transmission and the result is that you have 80’s car, with manual transmission and batteries so small that once you’re out of the driveway you’ve depleted 10% of the batteries (give or take, but that’s pretty much what you’ll get). And it had something like 15kW minus losses of the drive train.
But the parts are so expensive (at least for now) that listed price is almost 10k€. I can understand that seller wants their money back and it isn’t the most serious conversion out there, but the reality is that you’ll get a shitty 80’s car with a even shittier EV conversion (since the frame has it’s limits and high quality components are expensive) while you can sell a similar car with a combustion engine for 350€ on a good day and a tank full.