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.