Engine pull. Engine PullCircuit testFinished ProductThe motor and mount
OwnerGary Payton
Owner's Other EVRat Pack
LocationSeattle, Washington United States map
Web/EmailWebPage email image
Vehicle2002 Daihatsu Mira
This is a Japanese Daihatsu Mira kei
car conversion I helped lead for Fukui
Byora, a company that makes all sorts
of metal parts that you surely have in
your house somewhere inside stuff you
use.

I spec'd it and procured the parts.
It's an 8.6 KWH battery pack with an
AC motor going through the clutch to
the original manual transmission. The
guys in our company did the design,
machining, and installation of the
adapter system. It's pretty elaborate
and very well made. We all worked on
the actual build of the car.

As you can probably guess, we did this
conversion in Japan and just finished
it last week as this posting.
MotorHPEVS AC 15 3-Phase AC
43kw
DrivetrainAC motor mated to stock manual 5 speed
ControllerCurtis
Batteries48, 3.30 Volt, Lithium Iron Phosphate
Got these from Elite Power Systems.
Came
with a BMS but we decided it was too
much trouble for now. Others have had
success without them so we're
experimenting.

It's really 2 small 60AH 72V packs we
had to rearrange into a 120AH 72V
pack.
System Voltage72 Volts
HeaterElectric
DC/DC ConverterKelly
Just an inexpensive Chinese setup
Instrumentationrpm, charge, speedometer
Top Speed90 MPH (144 KPH)
AccelerationNot measured, should be much better than
original 660cc engine. Motor's torque is
2x the engine's!!!
Range60 Miles (96 Kilometers)
We guess 60 miles if you're not a lead
foot and hills don't eat your energy.
Watt Hours/MileNot measured
Seating Capacity4 in a pinch. Would be better if the
font seats had been installed in the
original for-aft position.
Curb Weight1,500 Pounds (681 Kilograms)
There are lots of little places were we
could have saved lots of weight but it's
a first build so...
Tires13" narrow Yokohama eco-tires
Conversion Time8 months
Conversion Cost$15K excluding labor
This isn't my personal car. It belongs to Fukui
Byora, the company. I proposed an EV club and they
basically said "why not?" They'll use it as a company
car once the rear springs are beefed up and a secondary
restraint is added to keep the battery from flying
forward in case of an accident.

I just helped lead the team, specified the parts,
procured them, and helped tear down and rebuild the car.

The most troublesome part was taking out the heater box
to put the electric heating element in. We literally
had to take the whole dash board, cross beam, and
steering linkage loose along with all sorts of wires and
other parts attached. LOTS of trouble there. In the
future, I'll just use a fluid heater and a reservoir...
Or just build a kit car.

A trick we used for the steering was to drain the power
steering fluid from the rack and just plug the input and
output. It yields something about 80% as good as a
proper manual steering rack.

In our test runs the car worked quite well, even with 4
people and climbing a reasonably steep grade.

code by jerry