I took the truck out on the road today. It's AWESOME. The first few runs I had some difficulty getting up to speed (couldn't go over 30 or so) but after adding more travel to the throttle sensor it is about as quick as it was as an ICE car. I drove it about 18 miles today, and I've only noticed a decrease of a few volts in pack voltage. I didn't even start with fully charged batteries! I think I'll get pretty good range out of this thing.

So far, I've had it up to almost 50 mph, but I'm sure it'll do 55, no problem. It pulls less than 100 amps at 45, and that's with a somewhat marginal drivetrain (high rolling resistance due to a lightly dragging brake and a few other things). Might go even faster, don't know for sure. It all depends on how many amps you want to draw.

I've got a few issues that I still have to work out. I've got a lot of tweaking to do on the controller and charger (20 amp circuit breaker? I can trip it...), but the most important part is IT RUNS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh yeah, it also makes this great noise like a turbine whine...

I love this thing!!!!!!!!!! And now I'll have all summer to play with it!

Okay, just as a quick update, I have it working a lot better now. It turned out to be a problem with the way I had the throttle sensor mounted. Anyway, it seems to have plenty of power now. More details later.

Hey, it's alive! Well, sort of. Yesterday, after all this work, I finally got it to go up and down the driveway under its own power. It was pretty exciting. I do have some troubleshooting to do. My car, after all this effort, fails to go signifcantly faster than walking speed. Needless to say, there is a problem. My controller seems to be malfunctioning. At this point, I think I can fix it. The most likely problem that I can think of so far is corrosion on one of the internal connections in the controller. I'm going to open it up later and see what I can find out.

Obviously, since the car is running, I've made plenty of progress on it since the last post. I put the metal bed back on (stupid wood, who needs the stuff, worthless trees...) and I've dropped 1000 lbs. of batteries into it. You can see them in the pics at the top of the page. That's before the final connections were made, but all the interconnects were installed in the back.

I was actually quite surprised how well my 1/4 ton truck handled 1300 lbs. of extra weight. It doesn't sit significantly lower than it did before conversion. Hard to believe, I know, but it's true!

Anyway, I've got to go get that controller fixed. I'll post up some more pics later on (if I remember).