My EV Requirements

Today I am going to try and put to blog what my electric Saturn should do for me. It is obvious that I want 600km range 0-100km/h in 4 seconds and a quick charge of 3 minutes of course that would make the project a non starter.

Lets look at the Saturn L200 specs. and see how closely we can get to that using an electric drive train.

My daily commute to work and back is approximately 60km, I would like to have a minimum of 120km so that in the event of a power failure one night I can still get to work the next day.

In order to determine the energy in kWh needed in the battery pack I will use a rule of thumb that I found on here.

The rule of thumb is specifically for LiFeP04 batteries and it simply states that for one US Gallon of gasoline used in the ICE (32kWh/Gal) car you want to convert is equal to 8kWh in the LifeP04 battery pack.

From the Saturn L200 specs. it has a 25/33 MPG city/highway.

Since I want 120km or 74.5645 miles in city driving that means that I need 74.5645mi./25mpg (I am assuming range at all city driving) 2.98258 gallons or 23.86064kWh. Isn't it amazing to consider that that's about 2/3 of gal of gas worth of energy!

Once we know the energy of the pack we have to determine in what configuration we can chose any product of voltage and Ah.

I am looking at the ThunderSky cells they come in 40Ah to 200Ah and as a general rule the larger the pack voltage the lower gauge your wiring can be. Of course there are other issues to consider such as what is the controller's max input voltage. Below I have an image that compares different ThunderSky LiFeP04 cells.



When I compare Price, weight, peak power, and volume I find the 90Ah cells my best bet. The info is from eMotion Propulsion, (to be clear I have never done business with them but I will be considering them.)

To recap, I am thinking that I need a battery pack of 78 of the 90Ah cells in order to meet my range requirements. The pack will cost me almost $13000 before taxes but when I compare that to paying a little over $2500 a decade ago for a pack that weigh almost 750kg vs 250kg and the fact that my lead acid had a cycle life of about 300 vs 3000, I think that I'm getting my moneys worth.

From the Saturn L200 specs. it specifies that my engine is a 135HP at 5200RPM and that it develops 142 ft.lbs of torque at 4400RPM, I feel that at a pack that can supply almost 96HP (pack voltage of 265V able to give 10 second bursts of 270A).

I will do some research to determine the ideal electric motor to replace my 135HP ICE as specified above.

Until then if you have some info or advice please leave me a comment

The Plan

Hello :)

My name is Angelo and I have a passion for EVs (Electric Vehicles). It started actually about a decade ago when I happened to discover a great web site called Jerry's EV Conversion. Jerry was converting an 1985 Mazda 626 and he so inspired me that by the time he finished I was committed to converting my old rusting 1989 Mazda 323.

The Mazda 323 was a car that had broke down while I was a student at Concordia University, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and consequently I could not afford to fix. However by the time I was finished reading about Jerry's EV adventure I was working and had some cash to spend on my EV passion.

I bought a kit form Electro Automotive, the kit was actually made for a heavy vehicle like a pick up truck (it had a 28hp 9" Advance DC motor) but I wanted to make sure that I had enough power. Electro Automotive also paid the shipping for my Mazda 323 transmission so that they could make me an adapter to made the DC motor to transmission.

I'll answer the questions that are probably on every ones mind, which are:

1. What was the range? I had a range of approx 60km
2. What was max speed? Not sure, I got it up to 120km/h but because I was worried about range. My normal commute was bumper to bumper traffic over the Champlain Bridge with an 80km/h stretch on the Bonaventure. Total daily commute approx. 40km.
3. How long to charge? Not sure because I would plug in as soon as I got home and un plug the next morning. Depending on if I needed to go out car would be plugged in between 6 to 12hrs, a depleted battery pack should be charged in 8 hours the rest of the time I was on trickle charge.

You maybe wondering why am I blogging about this a decade later, well, a few weeks ago someone asked me for some information related to a conversion they are thinking about doing and since its been a while I started doing some research and was blown away by how far things have come. Especially from watching Jack Rickard and Brian Noto of EVTV and there amazing conversions.

I bought a 2001 Saturn LX200 a few years back with the intention of converting it to all electric and I am thinking that it is about time that I do. The reason for the Saturn is because it is a car that is mainly polymer and can't rust unlike the Mazda 323 which was so badly rusted after 2 years that I took the car off the road. Also my nephew Dario was so young that he thought all rusty cars were electric:)

I am still working out how I plan to structure this project but I will probably go through specification phase trying to describe the minimum requirements, followed by a design phase and finally the implementation phase.

This project will probably be fairly expensive but I am really feel like I must do this. I have an idea about this from another conversion that I saw at Gav's EV Conversion, he basically is offering for free on his site an explanation of how he converted his car while also selling in DVD and eBook format. I may also use an idea from Jack Rickard of EVTV which is selling the conversion with a modest profit so that I can make another :)

Well, thanks for your time and by all means feel free to leave me a comment.