There hasn’t been a post in nearly a year. There actually hasn’t been much going on with the project in that time. The car was only run for about 1 month last year and then it was parked. There were some pretty major flaws with the design on the car that prohibited me from running it all spring/summer/fall. The primary flaw comes back to the original design of the car:

• I designed the system a little too close to spec (to save money on the initial build). I designed the car to bring me from work to home in near ideal conditions. My commute is about 9 miles and my max range is about 12 – in ideal conditions. When it was raining hard or the wind was whipping I would be crawling by the time I got to work. Also, as the batteries wore down it became the norm to be “limping” into work. This is the primary reason the car was parked for much of the year last year. I also started going to the gym each morning which added an extra 6-7 miles to my morning commute – the car simply didn’t have the juice to make the trip. Now I’m faced with an expensive upgrade to the controller, batteries, and charging system in order to safely put my car back on the road. By saving some money in the beginning on the initial build, I’m costing myself a small fortune now to upgrade.

I do plan on remedying this flaw this summer. With some luck I can do some fund raising and get the new parts I need. I plan on bringing the system up to 120v (I’ve read where others have taken the same motor up that high). This leaves me to replace the controller, purchase more batteries and upgrade the charging system. The additional power should make the drive much more reliable. If you’re looking for inexpensive used EV parts, subscribe to the RSS feed and you’ll be updated when I’m ready to sell the parts.