[rillip3]

I just joined this site after reading a lot of the discussions. I've had the bug about building an EV for a long time, and just bought a possible donor car. It's an 1989 Ford Probe.

I plan to drive it for a while as an ICE vehicle before I commit to the conversion - why risk spending all the time and money only to learn that I don't actually care for the car?

Makes sense to me. I'm actually selling my donor car at a loss after realizing that I didn't actually want to be inside it...

In any event, I've noticed that there are multiple thread, blogs, etc. where people talk about starting to convert a Probe, but the thread and blogs seem to fade away before the projects are complete. Is this because it's a particularly difficult vehicle to convert, or just because conversion projects have a low completion rate in general?

Probably the latter. A lot of us spread our projects out for a long calendar period too - life happens and gets in the way of the work. Stupid work.

As for the rest, your reasoning is fairly spot on. 72v definitely won't make you happy. As for the regen, looks like the kostov is not really perfect for it, check this thread for what I'm referring to:

http://www.diyelectriccar.com/forums/showthread.php/regen-kostov-11-zillai-34275.html