This is going to be a sizeable project, both in effort and in money. So, I want to be as prepared as I can be, with the super-big caveat that I’ve never done one of these conversions before and I can’t find anyone on-line who has done this either.

There’s SuperFastMatt and his electric Jaguar, there’s JerryRigEverything with the electric Humvee, but in both cases the original car was hacked up pretty extensively plus both had budgets that were obviously more generous than mine. I learned a lot from watching their videos, I am standing on the shoulders of giants, but this one is still different enough that it warrants doing my homework from scratch.

Step 1 – Capacity

The first thing I tried to figure out is the “capacity”. That means figuring out the type of battery, the size of the battery, and (in the end) the range I should be able to get. I think that all motors are close enough to the same in efficiency to make the battery-power-range math work out the same, so I’m leaving motor selection for step 2.

Step 2 – Performance

This part assumes infinite power from “the battery”, and it’s not worried about how far the car will go given wind-resistance etc. It’s focused on how to get BEV-performance (0-60mph, staying power) to be the same or slightly better than ICE-performance. I’m not building the next white zombie, I’m not going for ludicrous speed, I just want the car to handle the same or a bit better than it was originally designed. So, motor selection, gear-box, torque and rpm’s, all that.

Step 3 – Budget

This is piece that makes you go back to the drawing board on 1 & 2 to re-visit your selections. Yes, as long as anything is possible, everything looks like a great idea. Once you factor in the pricing & availability, things suddenly get a lot more complicated. I don’t have a machine shop or even easy access to one, I don’t have any of the myriad of fancy tools some of these folks are using, and I don’t have a sponsor-network with deep pockets. This has to work on a normal-person-budget in a modest garage and still come out to meet all of the criteria.

.

In the end, I think I have things figured out so it will all work out along all 3 categories. It’s technically complicated but feasible, the range and performance look altogether decent, and I can probably more-or-less afford this adventure over time. Lots of assumptions, just as many unknowns, but none of them look glaring. I think I have considered all of the Big Questions and have come out to where yes, let’s go do this, and the next set of questions will be smaller and workable.

The official definition is that any “real” project needs a budget and a time-line, and if you don’t have both then it’s not a project, it’s a hobby. Fair enough, and I totally agree with that in my day-job. Flip-side, this undertaking very much is a hobby, so that means I get to futz one of the two constraints. In my case, time is extremely flexible, as in things will happen when they happen. I’m going to try to stick to budget, I’ll get close, and we’ll see where that lands. The timing is (right now) entirely open and I’m not even estimating.

Now all I have to do is hop to it, and make things happen. The donor car is sitting in the garage, I have the big pieces on order and coming in, it’s all looking super-positive and ready to collide head-on with reality.