[reiderM]

My first questions:

1. Ridiculous? Not gonna happen? Too ambitious for someone who’s never pulled the engine out of a car before? Considered starting on something simpler like putting an EV West kit on a bug for my girlfriend, but go big or go home
2. Would a Leaf part swap work here or is the Scout gonna be too heavy? The battery box as is (per googling some measurements) would kinda fit in the bed initially (a little wide, so might need to sit on top of the wheel wells and be otherwise supported)
3. Or would I need to be looking at something like a Tesla motor?
4. I'm assuming the mechanical challenge with the Leaf would be mating the motor with the transmission?
5. Is there another obvious clear best path forward as far as motor and related parts selection goes?
6. I'd probably need to upgrade the brakes right?
7. Likewise with power steering?

Appreciate any feedback!

You can absolutely do a conversion. Anyone can given enough time. I've been learning as I go and it's gone great. As long as you understand basic safety procedures for working with high voltage and don't accidentally short the batteries, it's hard to mess something up that you can't go back and fix. Set a pessimistic timeline (9 months), and try to surprise yourself.

For what it's worth, I started this process having never done anything with cars. Not even changing the oil. But with hands-on experience, I have learned loads about everything related to engines than I thought was possible.

The kinds of conversions that are much more challenging are ones where you're either working on a very tight budget or are programming and building some of your own components (a lot of people build their own inverters for example). Using off-the shelf parts or a leaf motor, its relatively straightforward.

I'm going to echo what Tremelune is saying here. The leaf motor would be more than enough power to get to 75 mph IF you use a gearbox, which I highly recommend. The only challenging bits of the leaf are adapter plates for adapting it to the transmission and the voltage. Nissan leaf inverters require 300-400 volts I believe for full performance (although they will spin with less), which is why I'm not going to use a leaf motor in my conversion, since I need at least 140-150 miles of range and I am using tesla modules for their energy density. If you are going to use a leaf motor, I would just buy an entire salvage leaf (<$10k) and pull the motor and battery pack from it. The leaf motor has a fixed differential bolted on but that can be easily removed if you want to mate it to a manual transmission. This option is the cheapest and would definitely be a good choice.

Another option is to go with a Netgain Hyper9 HV motor, which is a motor designed specifically for conversions. They're $4300 for the motor, inverter, and contactor. You can pair that with 7 Tesla modules ($1000 each about) for 35kwh of battery capacity. This should give you at least 80 or so miles of range, and driving conservatively I'd guess you would get over 100 easily. A total for this option would be somewhere around $20k.

A Tesla motor is unnecessary for your needs and requires a lot of fabrication work.

Don't go with EV West. They have a 5-year waitlist for conversions they do themselves and they have made it clear to me that they don't want the business of individual enthusiasts from my email exchanges with them.

You probably won't need to upgrade brakes or power steering assuming they are working fine in the current vehicle. All in, post-conversion the car will only weigh a few hundred pounds over what it weighed before I would guess.

 

[reiderM]

So if I used the components from a Leaf I'd have to use the battery setup in pretty much its exact existing configuration if I wanted to use the Leaf BMS right?

I'm not too concerned about perf, and 75 top speed is probably fine for me, but if I wanted to increase the range to more like 150mi (maybe even 200mi) what would I be looking at? A full set of 14 Tesla battery modules? Is a full Bolt pack likely to meet that requirement with a Hyper9?

I'm still a bit undecided about the requirements. I know what my bare min requirements are, but if I end up spending more on a really nice example of a Scout it seems silly to not go all out on the conversion. I don't have a hard budget requirement, just what I feel like I want to put into it.

For 150 miles you probably want to do almost exactly what I'm doing: a Hyper9 with 10 Tesla modules 5s2p (5 in series, 2 in parallel). Or you could shoot for closer to 200, with a Hyper9 HV and 14 Tesla modules 7s2p. Netgain motors will be a little easier to use since there are pre-made adapter plates available from CanEVs and a few other sellers that can just be bolted on and put right into the car. You do need a BMS for each parallel string though, so keep that in mind as an added expense.

I would go for a leaf system if you don't need more than say 80 miles of range. Above that, something Hyper9 or Hyper9 HV based.

You'll definitely want to do it right the first time though. I personally would reccommend the Tesla and Hyper9 route since Tesla batteries are the best available and will last for at least 8-10 years, if not more. They've come down in price significantly lately too.

 

[reiderM]

This is an awesome design. So you're gonna basically fill the engine bay with batteries?

I understand a lot more about how the 4wd components work now. I'd probably lose a reasonable amount of efficiency in 4wd yeah? I'd consider pulling out the transmission and transfer case for efficiency but I guess that would be a lot of fabrication work like your project, which might be a bit out of my league for now.

4WD won't make a huge difference in efficiency as long as its part-time. Most 4WD cars are part-time, meaning you can change the transfer case from only delivering power to two of the wheels vs all four. Leaving it in essentially 2WD means that the only efficiency lost from having 4WD will be the added weight (no more than a couple hundred pounds). So expect a 4-8% decrease in efficiency and total range by having 4WD.

Leaving it in 4WD will result in a larger loss in efficiency (possibly over 10%), so I would just keep it in 2WD unless off-roading.

I would say definitely DON'T get rid of the transfer case. You will need to get new shafts and more to get that working, and I think that it's a waste of your time and money to essentially make that car worse. Instead, spend that money in getting 4-8% more battery capacity so that you can still hit your desired range with the added weight.