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.
this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.