In the past, when I’ve looked at such things, they were about as expensive as buying an EV, and tended to offer far shorter range and no regenerative braking.
Missing regen braking doesn’t even make sense, that can’t be THAT hard to implement in a controller
Depends on what motor they use. Some get weird. The people I know who coverted a car didn’t try for regen because their surplus motor was wound in a way that makes regen really tricky, and you don’t want to get this wrong.
It’s an extremely tricky thing to get right, blending regen and normal braking. It’s going to be unique to each car, and getting it wrong makes the brakes feel absolutely awful.
for 15k€, a minimum of specs need to be guaranteed.
I am highly skeptical but willing to be convinced. How do they handle mechanical throttle linkages and emissions ECUs? Does it go through you’re existing transmission and drivetrain?
“We take out the combustion engine and we have a frame which uses the old points of the engine,” Timo Walden, project manager at e-Revolt and one of the company’s first investors, explained. “And so we can easily swap only the engine with the new frame and the components. And that’s why we are much faster than an individual solution. So, the frame here is a big part of our fastness”. The company says it usually takes on average around a day to complete the process, which includes stripping the old engine block out of the car and replacing it with its patented battery technology and engine frame, as well as the full digitalisation of the vehicle. Costing between €12,000 and €15,000 to complete the job, the price point may give some reassurance to many consumers who currently can’t stretch their budgets to buy a new EV.
Article too vague in that regard, but it seems such cars are allowed to transit on german roads, so assumingly they are safe to drive.
Wait. The battery AND the motor is only where the ICE was? What’s the range than? 40km?
Pretty easy on modern front wheel drive only engines. The skeptical part is brakes, HVAC, alternator etc rely on combustion engine. So it’s possible to fit Prius type hvac, not sure what you would do about rear braking, transmission interlock, security system, radiator core, a/c core…
You could keep factory brakes and some cars already have electric brake pumps, etc. Maybe fit electric vacuum boost.
Diesel engines don’t generate vacuum so there are a.number of options off the shelf.
Yeah, I forgot about all the systems that still use vacuum for power, too.
While i don’t know what their doing specifically, normally you replace the throttle petal and now pointless transmission entirely, and just make up new custom length driveshaft so your not at risk of mesing up anything safty critical.
The new EV components go on their own canbus network, and if they keep the dash they probably have a microcontroller playing translator between the two networks.
Costing between €12,000 and €15,000
It’s honestly shocking to me that it’s that cheap
I see they’re dumping the engine but I wonder how they’re handling the transmission. I bet it’s probably a manual only conversion.
EV conversion has been a thing for a while, albeit not at this scale, and my understanding is that automatic transmissions just turn to sand against the torque of a singular big EV motor. That’s why most dedicated EVs don’t have transmissions at all in favor of wheel specific motors and SSR gears.
someone needs to debunk the technicalities behind their ‘conversion’. for 15k€ you would still get a second hand EV in good condition
Manual EV? I’m OK with that!
Fantastic idea.
We should be using what we already have. Would love love love to convert everything to ev.
I’ve got a 2003 Golf. Could it be converted? Probably however 15k is about 5x what I paid for it. So unless they bring the price down considerably most will just buy new models. If you can remove the frame and drop the chassis onto an electric frame and keep costs down. That might be the way to go. Solid state batteries should also make a huge difference. I need 250 -350km minimum for it to make sense. Make it cheaper and force government to subsidize it.
Zero point making 8 billion people scrap their old cars and buy evs. Just pointless
Hmm, tempted to do this to my old car.
I am a bit conflicted on one hand I am sure changing it over will be better than petrol. But on the other hand I am not sure how much emissions are generated from making the batteries themselves. I think we need more bio fuels. At least until we can make batteries don’t require lithium mining.
Making a battery causes emissions once, using gas causes emissions for every tank refined, transported, and burned. You cross the threshold into reduced emissions pretty quickly- power generation on the grid is exponentially more efficient than refining and burning gas continually.
This!
Bio fuels are just a different kind of oil. Hydrocarbons reacting with oxygen to release CO2 and heat.
Lithium mining is evaporating saltwater with sunlight.
It would be nice if we would actually fully switch to this method of mining lithium. It’s slowly happening, but not fast enough. The majority of our lithium still comes from rock mines, at the moment.
I’m sure there’s concern there, but I would like to see how that is offset by the elimination of various extra systems a EV doesn’t need like the transmission, drive line, gear boxes, diffs, drive shafts, axles, and the various fluids needed for maintenance and lubricantion of these various systems.
Then there is the mining for the various computer controlled components for these systems but that’s probably a wash.
I don’t know how the numbers work out in a conversion like this, but in new cars EVs take about 1.5 to 2 times the emissions of ICE cars to build including battery. That being said, 91% of a ICE’s emissions are from the gas, not producing the car.
Wtf. You obviously haven’t looked into EVs. There’s still all those things, a planetary gear set because you need Regen braking and you need wheel speed at X rpm and need to keep electric engine below… 12000? Rpm, likely lower.
You don’t need fluid clutch, you can reduce brakes with Regen braking, but still need emergency braking. There are some designs with two motors for each wheel, but it complicated Regen energy storage.
Short answer, all the emissions from building a new battery are about on par with a single year of gas consumption. If you include charging from the current US electrical grid, break even is two to three years.
Your average gas car produces two to three times its weight in carbon dioxide every single year it’s on the road. The climate impact of building cars is rather small compared to the impacts of using them, even in modern EVs the co2 cost of building them is only a third of the electricity to power them off the modern grid, which itself is about half of what a gas car outputs.
Finally, while it might improve with further agricultural electrification and carbon reductions, at present biofuels only offer a 33% reduction in co2 emissions compared to using straight gas. By contrast EVs offer a 60% to 100% reduction in fuel co2 emissions.
