Slashdot Mirror
A Honda Civic With no Gas Tank (Video)
It took Dr. Adam Blankespoor two years and $14,000 to convert his 1996 Honda Civic into an all-electric plug-in vehicle. He's an automotive engineer and researcher, but if he can do it, you can probably follow in his footsteps and create your own electric vehicle if you are so inclined. He talks about a 45 mile range, with 30 miles as a practical limit. That's not competitive with the Tesla S, but there's also a massive price difference to consider. This is another person Slashdot met at the Ann Arbor Maker Faire. If you want to see what kinds of electric vehicles other have made, possibly for inspiration, the Electric Vehicle Photo Album is a good place to start. And if you want information on how to build your own electric car, using "electric car conversion" as your Google search term will put you on the track of more electric car information than you can shake a Tesla Coil at.
SHOCKING!
$14000 buys an awful lot of gas.
if you don't stop drivin' that hot rod Lincoln
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
It is geeky and cool. If you don't get that you might be on the wrong website.
Geeky and cool does not mean useful. In fact most of the best geeky and cool things are not useful at all.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
If it's a '96 Civic with "mods," the de rigeur for that means a 4ft tall wing, garish paint, and a fart-cannon exhaust.
Same reason nerds here would hot-rod their PCs or other electronics: the hobbyist does it for passion, not practicality! What these people learn - at their own expense - can inspire and/or educate others.
Oh boy, here we go.
Crumple zones and chassis structure are not touched. In a low-speed collision, nothing more happens. In a high-speed collision, there may be some leaking of electrolyte (The same way the lead-acid battery in your ICE car can leak), but there will be no dangerous inflammable liquids spilling around. Electrically, the battery pack is automatically isolated via inertia switch and circuit breakers and isolating fuses, along with contactors which separate on 12v power loss.
No. In an accident, the system is automatically isolated, as noted above. In addition, the power-carrying cables from front to back run along the underside of the vehicle, usually along the old exhaust tunnel, keeping them far away from anywhere emergency services may be operating.
Oil gets spilled. Some metalwork gets crumpled.
Some metalwork gets crumpled.
What would happen if you ran your gas vehicle into a nuclear facility...
They would scrape the remains of you and your car off the sides of the impenetrably thick concrete cooling towers.
Immovable object, meet easily squashable force.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think a primary reason why you might want to do a conversion is that you then have total control over parameters of performance, and can tweak them to your hearts content.
Also you can take a car you really like to begin with and simply make it run on electric, rather than having to buy one of the few electric car designs existing (Have not seen the i-Meiv but I hated the Volt's interior and dash)
I agree with you about the range on this being just too low. I'd like to see a do it yourself hydrogen conversion, which would be similar but eliminate the battery and give you great range.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think there is a lot here to sacrifice. No heat or AC I presume, if you want to get 30 miles on a full charge. So basically useless in the North region, and hot as hell if you live in Texas. Probably useless in mountainous regions, and I imagine there is a weight limit to this car. A person would be better of using a Golf Cart to drive their ass around town.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/automobiles/autoreviews/one-big-step-for-tesla-one-giant-leap-for-evs.html?hp
Hey, just incidentally the New York Times reviewed the Tesla Model S today. There seems to be a lot of electric vehicle haterz on Slashdot lately, I don't get why, but if you're legitimately interested in the tech, rather than just Detroit astroturf, the NYTimes review is certainly worth a read.
"Put simply, the automobile has not undergone a fundamental change in design or use since Henry Ford rolled out the Model T more than a century ago. At least that’s what I thought until I spent a week with the Tesla Model S."
30 mile range is a 15 mile radius. That's barely beyond practical bicycle range. If he had picked up cycling (with or without a helmet) instead of converting his civic to electric, it would be better for the environment, he would be healthier, and it would cost a whole lot less too.
It is geeky and cool. If you don't get that you might be on the wrong website. Geeky and cool does not mean useful. In fact most of the best geeky and cool things are not useful at all.
I now know how to describe my penis - thanks.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I don't understand why this is a story at all.
Did you already forget what site you're on?
But, for another grand or two, he could have bought a brand new 40+ MPG IC vehicle with a warranty, all kinds of new safety features, and a range of hundreds of miles with a "recharge" time of about 5 minutes.
Yeah, but thats way out of his budget and wasteful. First of all if he spent $14K on his hobby car thats probably because his budget was $14K and not a penny more... so telling him there's a really nice donor car available for only $15K is kind of pointless, especially if the total cost of the conversion would be $15K for the donor plus $14K for conversion parts and tools, that's $29K for a guy with a firm $14K budget.... Also he's throwing out a brand new IC engine with warranty, kinda a waste to buy it to begin with. I don't think the aftermarket for a nearly brand new IC engine is very healthy, he's probably not going to get much money for the nearly new engine he would be throwing out.
Most of the guys I've read about who convert, get a donor car for practically free because the engine is hopelessly blown. The demand is low enough that there's a seemingly infinite supply of cosmetically great cars with dead drivetrains. You don't have to get a beater and usually don't have to pay much if anything above scrap value which usually isn't much.
His project car cost of $14K is probably a nearly free car and very nearly $14K of parts and tools. You might be operating under the mistaken assumption his budget distribution was like $13995 for the car and $5 to convert it, kind of like how ricer's take a civic and put and exhaust tip on it and its an insta-racer car, in which case your offer of a vastly superior donor chassis for $15000 makes sense because you're thinking he'd have a much better base chassis and the jump from $14000 total to $15005 total is well worth going over budget in exchange for a much better donor chassis...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It's "Slashdot" represented in 7-bit ASCII, LSB on top and MSB on the bottom of each character.
What I can't understand is how the GP got modded up on a nerd site! I swear, there should be some way to make sure only nerds get mod points; any nerd would have modded that luddite to oblivion.
Free Martian Whores!
You are correct, but missing the point as a lot of people are. Electric cars are important for reasons that have nothing to do with CO2 emissions. US electricity production is 100% produced from domestic sources, none of it from imported sources. Gasoline requires the US to pay various loathsome countries who don't have our best interests at heart. Anything that reduces US dependency on foreign oil and shifts it towards domestic electricity is a huge plus. We can worry about producing cars, even electrics, in a more environmentally friendly way after we break the dependency on foreign oil, or at least reduce it to an amount we can get only from trustworthy, friendly nations (ie. Mexico, Canada, Norway).
Dealing with stall currents is tough on EV design.
most people don't know what stall currents are. several wikifascists took issue with improvements to the "wheel hub motor" wikipedia page, recently, when facts were presented that showed that the efficiency of EV motors is far, far worse at low RPMs than any ICE vehicle ever could be.
for those people not familiar with "stall currents", stall conditions for an electric motor is when it is operating at or just above 0 RPM (i.e. stall). not only is the motor not moving (so there's not enough air circulation), but the electric wire, as an inductor, is capable of absorbing far more current. that just means more heat is produced, and that the efficiency is lower. a typical EV motor can be only 12 to 15% efficient (!!) at its lower RPMs! avoiding this worst-case situation is flat-out impossible with a Direct-Drive (Wheel Hub) motor. for a bicycle that doesn't matter so much (you can always pedal), but for a car it's a serious problem.
this is why VW's XL1 concept car has a *seven* speed automatic gearbox. electric motors have to be kept in their optimal efficiency band, just like an ICE does. it's complicated! much more complicated.
Why does it have a 5 speed manual transmission? I thought that one of the advantages of electric motors was the low-end torque, eliminating the need for gear shifting.
US electricity production is 100% produced from domestic sources, none of it from imported sources.
Really? When did you surrender and become part of Canada then?
Electric vehicles are vary useful, but you have to get past the moronic safety requirements and the "I need a truck" retardation that most american drivers have. a vehicle the size of a Smart Car but 3/4 the width would be perfect. 1 seat, room for some baggage, and sleek enough to do 75mph without much drag. You can EASILY make this a 200 mile range electric car with a fast recharge from 110VAC or solar.
Yea! What sort of inbred redneck ever needs to carry more than their own ass and an overnight bag! Fucking savages!
And you can make them safe in case you have to tangle with a idiot in a SUV... a lot of people dont have the IQ to realize that.... they dont have all the really stupid and heavy safety devices required in the USA.. what they think they know is incredibly wrong and inaccurate... Looking at what morons out there believe...
2 points:
1 - you're not going to garner a lot of support for your cause when you use terms like "morons" and "Don't have the IQ" to refer to anyone and everyone who doesn't march in lock-step with your apparently militant position.
2 - If you're going to waste your time with a good 2 paragraph rant about how so many people are just oh-so much dumber than yourself, you may want to learn proper English. I.e., "you're" = "you are," "don't" has an apostrophe, words that start with vowel sounds are prefaced with "an," not "a," and the first word in a sentence is always capitalized.
Note how I was able to both refute your rant and call you out on your own ignorance, without once resorting to name calling. FYI, this is how you make an effective argument.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The Smart Four Two is safer in a crash than any SUV ever made, but a lot of people dont have the IQ to realize that.
I suggest you go to youtube and watch some of the Smart crash test videos. Against larger cars, the Smart usually gets punted quite far.
If everyone drove something that size, sure. But mass does matter.
Giant stun-gun.
If we had intelligent inspections in this country, it shouldn't be a problem: an amateur builder should be able to get a DMV inspection of his/her car and that should be one of the rules for EVs or home-built hybrids. In many states, they already have special inspections for home-built cars, where a DMV person will do a basic safety check. Considering how few people actually make home-built cars of any kind, it really shouldn't be that hard to have one competent DMV person in every metro area able to do such an inspection with an appointment. Note that I'm talking about a one-time road-worthiness inspection, when the amateur builder is applying for a license plate and registration for his vehicle, not the annual safety inspection that some states require and is usually done at independent businesses.
So you're complaining about wasting time...on slashdot?!
There's a difference between wasting my time and wasting my employer's time.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon