DIY Electric Car Highlights and Progress

By mattW on August 28, 2008 8:09 AM | Permalink

The DIY website has been going under some pretty impressive changes and has included some pretty interesting threads over the past few months, but with over 3000 members and an average of 400 new threads a week there is a lot of content to go over. So I thought it would be helpful to pick out some of the highlights of what I have found to be the most interesting threads and developments of DIYelectriccar over the past few weeks:

The DIY Garage; Robert has done an amazing job in designing, programming and tweaking the new garage for the forums which now includes 60 user vehicles. I think this feature will allow us to form more of a community as we get to know each others' cars and progress as well as inspiring us onwards for our own projects. Some highlights include dimitri's very clean "Miata EV", jbrecher's "Destiny 2000" with a 90 mile range at 55 and of course my slowly progressing "Elixxer" electric motorbike.

The DIY Wiki is growing nicely and continues to be updated. The page Battery Technology 201 - Alternatives to Lead Acid Batteries is growing into amazing resource with a huge amount of information as well as links to suppliers. Dimitri has outlined how he achieved his Power Steering using Toyota MR2 EHPS pump and we have the beginnings of database recording Recharge locations worldwide.

On the forums, todayican shows off his EV grin with a video of the first drive in his scratch built electric reverse trike, rctous is going for the world's most productive EV converter with his Geo Storm Build thread and progress seems to be being made as some of our members develop plans for their home built electric hub motors. They are up to 29 pages and getting technical and detailed enough that it looks like it's going to happen.

Outrunner Motor with Shaft 2008-08-19 (exploded).jpg

Finally we have the addition of the new production EV section , including discussion on how to turn a Prius into a plug-in and the details of the upcoming Chevy Volt.

So whatever tickles your fancy, make sure you check out what's happening on DIYelectriccar.com. If you have other highlights you'd like to recommend, link your favourite thread in the discussion of this blog article on the forums.