Owner | Mike Greig |
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Location | Victoria, British Columbia Canada map |
Web | WebPage |
Vehicle | 1990 Geo Metro Picked up the car for free from a friend. |
Motor | Advanced DC 6.7 Series Wound DC Picked up the motor and controller for $1000 used! |
Drivetrain | 5 speed manual transmission |
Controller | Curtis 1231C |
Batteries | 8 Deka Dominator Gel, 12.00 Volt, Lead-Acid, Gel Bought the batteries from a friend of a friend. His boss has several EVs and I was able to get a good used set for scrap value....$10 each! |
System Voltage | 96 Volts |
Charger | Soneil 12V I am very happy with these chargers although they get COOKING hot when they're plugged in. Even after the batteries are charged they continue to produce heat. I'm going to have to set up a fan to cool them. |
Heater | I have installed a ceramic heater core into the stock heater core and run wires under the hood. I now just need a fuse and a switch to get some heat. I'll probably get to that sometime in mid-November. Update: 96v and a ceramic core produces almost no heat. Next is a fluid heater. |
DC/DC Converter | Never bothered, just charged my 12v accessory battery with the traction pack. |
Instrumentation | Multimeter |
Top Speed | 65 MPH (104 KPH) Still has lots to go but it really drinks amps at high speeds so I try to stick to secondary roads. |
Acceleration | About what it was stock. |
Range | 30 Miles (48 Kilometers) 30 miles is no problem at all. I wouldn't push it much farther than that until I get the rest of my batteries in. |
Seating Capacity | 2 |
Tires | Stock |
Conversion Time | 18 months of part-time effort. The odd evening and weekend and I took the winter off. |
Conversion Cost | $2570 |
November 2012 Electronics now mounted under the hood. Battery racks built and secured. Won't be long now. UPDATE July 2013 I have been driving the car full-time for around 3 weeks now and am thrilled with it. I'm currently running 96V as the car just won't handle 700lbs of batteries without at least upgrading the rear springs. I will get them all in eventually. Haven't really had any issues with it other than the clutch slips a little when the motor heats up. Lesson learned about cheaping out and re-using an obviously worn-out clutch disk. Update May 2014: My battery pack suffered a sudden and unexpected death. As I need a new pack, I'm going to start hunting for a new donor car as well. This car has been a great project but has a few to many issues and things I would have done differently. |