If you are starting with a typical school bus you will need to entirely replace the front axle to drive the front wheels. For the rear, you replacing the rear axle and suspension, or mounting a motor somewhere near the middle of the bus to drive the shaft to the rear axle.I would love to convert a school bus RV to electric especially if I could make it a kind of 4x4/AWD hybrid
What do you mean by "4x4/AWD hybrid"? For a two-axle vehicle, AWD is four wheel drive and 4X4.
And why a school bus? If you convert to an EV, you are using little of the chassis. If you are mostly using the body, a school bus isn't a great starting point for an RV; the only good feature is metal construction (rather than sticks and plywood covered by fiberglass or aluminum, like a typical RV). It would be a lot easier to start with a motorhome which is cheap because it has an old or broken-down engine and transmission, since those are the parts you don't need.
Wheel motors sound cool, but are undesirable in almost every way.Shouldn’t this be quite doable with in wheel motors and a controller of some kind?
And in practical terms, each motor needs a controller... not just one for the vehicle.
You canHow would this be doable?
- drive all wheels with one motor, using conventional 4WD components, or
- drive each axle with a motor, or
- drive each wheel (which means either independent suspension, or mounting a pair of motors on an axle)