On Feb 25, 8:45*pm, Jon Elson wrote:
whoyakidding's ghost wrote:
On Mon, 25 Feb 2013 09:00:51 -0500, "Existential Angst"
wrote:

Most people on RCM could build their own electric car.

I actually built one in about 1984 or so. *A friend donated
a VW beetle with BAD rust. *You could see both rear tires
from the driver's seat, and there was no floor for the
driver. *I welded a piece of scrap for the driver's floor.
I got 4 90 AH trolling motor batteries and a Surplus Center
jet engine starter motor. *I got a Kaylor adapter to mount
the starter motor on the VW gearbox. *I built a field
current controller so I had some amount of speed control.
It was a lot of fun to drive, but would have been almost
impossible to get it licensed in that condition.

Anyway, I wanted to build a hybrid, and got a trashed
Honda 350 engine, and made a ghastly bad hack to fit a
stratofortress generator to it. *The engine barely ran,
and the coupling to the generator was going to rip itself
apart, so I kind of idled the project. *I still have all
the electric pieces, though. *Given the right body, I
could imagine trying this again on a small, stick shift car.

I think if doing it again, I'd go with maybe 8 deep cycle
batteries, an armature controller, and maybe skip the hybrid thing.

Jon

Hopelessly out of date. Modern EVs have an alternator with neodymium
magnets and are more then 90% efficient. They can spin up to 7000 rpm.
They have regeneration too, the control system to achieve all this is
incredibly complex but uses little power.
The batteries hold four times the power weight for weight compared
with lead acid.

harry wrote:


Hopelessly out of date. Modern EVs have an alternator with neodymium
magnets and are more then 90% efficient. They can spin up to 7000 rpm.
They have regeneration too, the control system to achieve all this is
incredibly complex but uses little power.
The batteries hold four times the power weight for weight compared
with lead acid.
I had regenerative braking, too. All you had to do was up the field
current, and current would flow back to the battery. Downshifting
helped, too. Regenerative braking is NOT incredibly complex.

Jon